Sally Wainwright’s new BBC drama Riot Women opens not with music, but with the sound of ice clinking in a glass and tonic fizzing as it’s poured over gin.
Beth (Joanna Scanlan) calmly prepares to end her life in a beautiful, light-filled room overlooking green gardens and a vista of rolling hills – a quiet, almost idyllic setting for an act of despair. It’s a devastating and deeply ironic beginning, setting the emotional stakes with precision.
Riot Women takes its name from, and subtly reworks, the 1990s Riot Grrrl feminist punk movement. This is no whimsical story of midlife reinvention. When Beth is drawn, almost accidentally, into forming a punk band with four other women of a certain age, the series unfolds as something richer: a fierce, surprising exploration of care-giving, menopause, resilience and the reclamation of voice.
