At the end of the first series of The Change we left our menopausal heroine (and never had those two words been seen together before Bridget Christie came along) in the Forest of Dean, dressed as the Eel Queen, finding joy in all her transitions. That is until her hapless husband showed up to drag her home. Noooooo! Don’t do it, Linda!!! Series two, fear not, picks up right where we left off. Linda (Christie) has still only used up 4,320 minutes of her time accrued from 3.5m minutes of domestic drudgery. She is still refusing to go home. Steve (Omid Djalili), her husband, still has jam on his face. And The Change is still the best (and probably the only) TV comedy series ever written about menopause.
Of course, like “the change”, this is about so much more than menopause. Christie’s glorious feminist sitcom is a meditation on witchcraft and witch-hunts, paganism, veganism, activism, community, the climate emergency, mushrooms, misogyny, the importance of wringing out a cloth before using it to wipe surfaces, and our national identity. If the first series tracked Linda’s journey to find herself, the second is about what roots that newly uncovered self might put down, and how they might grow an entire movement. By the final episode, stationers “from Gloucester to Bristol” have run out of “Linda’s ledgers” as an army of incensed women start logging chores, wearing “Je suis Linda” T-shirts, and playing pool in the pub before midday. The men, eventually, let them get on with it and sign up to the mandatory housework programme “For Men Who Wipe” with Pig Man. And the mother oak tree felled at the end of the first series grows a fresh green shoot. Hallelujah!
