The Change series two review – Bridget Christie's glorious feminist sitcom will leave you ecstatic
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!
Before all that tree-huggery, though, there is deep discord. Enraged by Linda's new role as 'the Mick Lynch of dusting', the Verderer – surely the best-named angry white Englishman in TV history – orders a town trial at Sarah's Cafe. Enter judge Joy (Tanya Moodie), who following Linda's genuinely moving defence – 'Did you know it takes three minutes and 12 seconds to shake crumbs out of a toaster?' – casts a vote as to whether she should 'leave' or 'remain'. The result is close: 48% to 52%. Linda remains! Brexit never looked so farcical, or on the nose.
Each episode is named after a natural phenomenon, ancient ritual or modern concept. Like 'Mycelium' – the thin fungal threads connecting plants and trees via underground mycorrhizal networks – in which Linda's chore ledger goes stratospheric and the newly radicalised townswomen start plaguing her with questions: 'Does sex go in the chore ledger, Linda?' 'What about the hand jobs? And the mouth jobs? And the bum jobs?' Her answer? If it feels like a chore, it goes in. Wise woman.
Or 'Psilocybin', in which the eels feeding the men at The Eel Cafe since 1850 become critically endangered, Linda forages for a vegan alternative and the menfolk end up on the trip of a lifetime, producing scenes 'like something out of a Ken Russell film'. Inevitably, they claim they have been 'eelmasculated'. And the Eel Sisters (whose configuration has changed this series, one of them now being Theresa, fresh out of jail) hold a silent supper for some dead spirits and Linda, who – spoiler alert! – as it turns out is their half-sister. The women go on strike, Steve and Siobhain (Liza Tarbuck), Linda's domineering sister, have full-blown midlife crises of their own, and, worst of all, the men start using one cloth to wipe everything. Retch!
The Change is ambitious, surreal, moving, and above all hysterically funny. It is unlike anything else on TV. Partly that is because Christie is a powerhouse of a standup immune to trotting out tired old tropes. Pig Man, for instance, may be a literal caveman but he is the most highly evolved character of them all, and he loves housework. Christie's absurdly British humour is also key, with hyperspecific jokes about, say, the zoologist and ethnologist Desmond Morris v the Welsh TV presenter Johnny Morris, and she can nail the national character with an observation as neat as a placard scrawled with 'Public castration is not a good idea'. But there is a seriousness at the soft heart of it: her bucolic vision is of a Britain that may not exist but very much could if we just ringfenced local funding to pay women 'chore benefit', and learned from the mushrooms. Oh, and gave more women their own TV shows.
It concludes with another (gentle) cliffhanger, maintaining the possibility of a third series. (And if there isn't one, we now have the how-to manual for enacting the feminist uprising.) It also ends, like the first series, in a state of unfettered jubilation as Linda guides a hippy celebration round the mother tree and makes yet another inspirational speech: 'Every living thing has a natural life cycle and every living thing dies, and that's the natural order. We fear it but we can live a life of purpose, like truffles.' It's not easy to weave an ecstatic, rousing and laugh-a-minute TV show out of a toxic patchwork of midlife despair, domestic inequality, sexism, misogyny, culture wars and ecological and political crises, but Christie has gone and done it again. What a joyful transition.
The Change is on Channel 4 now.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
12 hours ago
- Spectator
The past is another country: Ripeness, by Sarah Moss, reviewed
Sarah Moss is a prolific and vital novelist whose books encompass an array of subjects from Victorian social reform and 19th-century Japan to broken Brexit Britain and eating disorders. She combines teaching at University College, Dublin with writing in real time: The Fell, set during the second lockdown, came out in the summer of 2021, while My Good Bright Wolf, an experimental memoir about her anorexic breakdown in late 2020, was published last year. A forthcoming Channel 4 adaptation of Summerwater, which explored national identity and isolation against the backdrop of a soggy Scottish holiday park, may catapult her into the sort of gold-foil territory enjoyed by Maggie O'Farrell or Ali Smith. If not, then perhaps Ripeness, her ninth novel, will. Set partly in contemporary Ireland and partly in 1960s Italy, this is a tender book that explores issues such as identity, belonging and consent, themes that fit into Moss's wider oeuvre. 'Ripeness, not readiness, is all. Life has no form, you don't get to choose.' So mulls the protagonist Edith, riffing on Shakespeare's familiar lines, pitting a youthful Hamlet's readiness for death – 'voluntary, an act of will' – against an ancient Lear's ripeness – something that 'happens to us as to plums and pears, regardless of agency or volition'. The age dichotomy is deliberate. The novel features two different Ediths at two different life stages. The first is 73, living alone and happily divorced in present-day Ireland. The second is 17, taking a gap year before studying at Oxford. It is the mid-1960s and hemlines are rising everywhere, but 'had not reached the thigh of Italy'. Edith has been dispatched there by her mother, where her sister Lydia, a ballet dancer, is waiting out the final weeks of an unwanted pregnancy in her ballet master's sumptuous villa. Moss alternates chapters and perspectives, switching between third person for the older Edith and first person for her teenaged version, who is recounting her Italian adventure to an unnamed 'you'. This, it emerges, is her sister's child, who is handed over for adoption at birth. Edith writes without expectation that her words will ever be read but can't think what else to do. Despite the dark underside to what happened to Lydia, which has a parallel in the older Edith's story, this feels like a novel Moss had fun writing, not least because she gets to indulge the childhood love for ballet she detailed in My Good Bright Wolf. Her imagery is vivid. A jar of plum jam is 'still slightly warm, as if asleep'; Irish dry stone walls have 'a kind of stone lace… a tracery'. In Moss's hands, ripeness is more than just old age: it represents every woman's fertile body, to which too many men have helped themselves over the ages. This is an important and convincing book.
Leader Live
16 hours ago
- Leader Live
David Beckham to guest edit edition of Country Life Magazine
The former England captain and businessman will join the editorial team for the October 22 edition of the magazine with the aim of celebrating what the countryside means to him and his family. He follows in the footsteps of Royal Family members who previously joined the editor-in chief Mark Hedges at the helm, including the King, the Princess Royal and the Queen. Beckham said: 'I am honoured to have been invited to guest edit an edition of a magazine that I have always admired and read. 'I am really looking forward to working with the editorial team to produce an issue that will celebrate what the countryside and the great British landscape means to me and my family.' This comes as Beckham is to be awarded a knighthood in the King's Birthday Honours, according to reports by The Sun. The football star regularly documents his life in the countryside by posting pictures and videos on his Instagram including him harvesting vegetables, gardening and his flock of chickens. Mark Hedges, Country Life editor-in-chief, said: 'I know he has a deep love of the countryside, which has grown since he retired as a professional footballer, although he is, of course, still extremely busy as a businessman and an ambassador for a host of causes, such as Unicef and The King's Foundation, as well as being co-owner of Inter Miami CF in the US and Salford City Football Club in the UK. 'As someone who is passionate about the countryside, I'm excited to see what his special commemorative issue will bring.' The one-off edition aims to highlight how the countryside has played an important part in Beckham's life. It will feature his favourite view, his best-loved recipe and spotlight his rural champions, including the craftsmen and woman who helped shape his home in the Cotswolds. Beckham, who played for his country 115 times, is the only Englishman to score at three different World Cups and his career included the treble-winning campaign of 1998-99, when Manchester United won the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League. He earned the third highest number of England caps of all time for the men's team, and was captain on 59 occasions. The former winger married Spice Girl Victoria, also known as Posh Spice, in 1999.
New Statesman
18 hours ago
- New Statesman
Geoff Dyer's English journey
Geoff Dyer is an Englishman, though it can look as though he's spent his life pretending not to be. His literary subject matter – travel, Andrei Tarkovsky, American photography, American jazz – is full of what Philip Larkin warily called 'being abroad'. His literary output is similarly unrooted, slaloming between cultural history, literary criticism, comic fiction and general reminisces. In the 2003 work Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It (which combines all of the above) he writes that ''Home'… is the place where least has happened… peripheral and, as a consequence, more than a little blurred.' Now, though, he has produced that most conventional thing, a boyhood memoir, a book about his home, Cheltenham in the Sixties and Seventies, and about ours – a book about England. Dyer gives us all the first fights and first fucks, and before that all the mewling and pissed-off-with-his-schooling. He does refreshingly leave out the self-abuse that dominates the 20th-century iterations of the genre, telling me when we meet in London that, while 'there was no cover-up', other male writers had exhausted the subject. But though guided by what he has called 'perpetual revelation' – often shaming self-revelation – this book represents something of a swerve for Dyer, a project equal parts social and personal. Homework is a study of Dyer's childhood, but also of the worlds that it scampered through. There is the provincial geography of Dyer's boyhood Cheltenham, a terraced England of high streets, lanes, closes and drives. There is the motion of class in the post-war period, frozen like a great glacier for so many generations before the meltwater of the grammar school system opened new streams of social mobility, sending Dyer to Oxford University and the literary life that followed. And then there is a peculiarly English psyche, simultaneously mean and kind, of which Dyer's parents are two beautifully drawn representatives. He may or may not be one of the greats – his books are so segregated by topic that it is hard to imagine anyone beyond an unusually polymathic biographer enjoying them whole. But, handed a great novelist's confluence of theme, narrator and occasion, I think he has now written a great book. We're far from Cheltenham when Dyer and I meet. We're in the top two floors of a Victorian house in Ladbroke Grove, to which he moved back permanently from Los Angeles last month. It's newly renovated, with high ceilings and a stylish, minimalist decor. And Dyer is certainly not a mean host: the interview only begins after smooth, home-ground coffee and almond croissants the size of small calzones, sourced from a local bakery. In the typical back and forth of his comic style (in Homework he calls it 'ironic switchback'), Dyer first says he is delighted to be back after a decade in America. But it soon becomes clear he means London rather than Britain: 'Typically, as soon as we have to go anywhere else in England, then all my rage returns because of the fucked-up train system. And I'm instantly reminded of the thing that used to drive me more insane about England than anything… this Soviet-style resignation to inefficiency and things not working.' It's an ambivalence he summarises with a quotation from DH Lawrence: 'English in the teeth of all the world – even in the teeth of England.' DH Lawrence is the most consistent preoccupation of a career that has been defined by curiosity and obsession. And, much like his literary output, Dyer's maisonette is a display cabinet of his periodic interests. Greeting me on his landing (at 67, he has an impressively slim frame which continues to resemble a life-size Giacometti statue), Dyer immediately gestures at a poster for the avant-garde jazz band the Necks, newly framed and mounted by the front door. Dyer tells me he had partly arranged his return to England for early May so he could make their residency at Cafe Oto, in east London, attending six of their eight sets. In the kitchen, meanwhile, there is a panoramic photograph of Nevada's Burning Man, the anarchic, alternative festival of 'self-reliance' which has served as a Dyer setting and muse on more than one occasion. This life – the insecure, bohemian, ungrounded existence Dyer calls 'the writer's life' – is a world away from the ancestral milieu found in Homework. Dyer's father was a sheet-metal worker; his mother was a school dinner lady and then a hospital cleaner. As a trio, they led the kind of respectable lower-middle-class life that was utterly normal but which has now taken on theair of a foreign country. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe In the book, Dyer's parents never fly on a plane (on a family holiday to London they visit Heathrow, just to look at it). The front room of their two-up, two-down is never used, except at Christmas, its deliberate vacancy and dusty drinks cabinet proof of a family that had 'a toe-hold in the age of plenty… more than we needed'. When on holiday, the Dyers make their own beds to spare the maid at the B&B, 'incapable by nature, circumstances and habit, of being served in any way'. They collect the series of cards that would come free with boxes of Brooke Bond Tea. And the children play games about the Second World War, even as its living veterans, including Dyer's father, rarely mention it, leaving their little boys' campaigns of Airfix and Action Man, their imagined El Alamein, undisturbed by the truth of memory. At times, too, it resembles a postwar sitcom. The greatest refrain of the book surrounds Dyer's father's attitude to money, cautious and miserly, what Dyer calls a 'subsistence existentialism'. It supplies the funniest set-pieces, as when his father offers to buy a company boss a drink at their Christmas do, and receives the order of a 'double scotch', such an unthinking injustice ('a double!') that Dyer's father repeats the story like 'the Ancient Mariner' for days after. The parents are also habitual hoarders – expired Bird's custard power in the cupboard, banknotes under the mattress – while Dyer's dad steals as much stationery from work as he can manage, a squirrel-like trait that made me wheeze with recognition. (In 2018, my own family finally exhausted a stockpile of candles first established by my grandmother during the three-day week – a stockpile she too had stolen from her workplace.) Part of Dyer's project in this book is to historicise these hang-ups. Having grown up in the Thirties, his parents were 'an inevitable product of centuries of rural life in which obligations and hardships greatly outweighed all possibilities of treats or abundance'. He has partially inherited this attitude of thrift: should he ever give up writing, he tells me, he would find it 'quite fulfilling, clipping out discount coupons in the local papers', though he admits that he has 'paid a lot of money for Japanese denim' in his time. But he is decidedly ambivalent about this more general attitude of self-privation. 'Noble is certainly the wrong word,' he says; 'admirable is not quite the right word… My parents were so weirdly resistant to having anything made nicer in their lives… Rebecca [his wife] was always saying, 'Shouldn't we do this with your mum and dad?' And I'd say, 'Well, they won't want to'. There's no point because – I just knew there wasn't.' The postwar instinct ofself-privation is a cousin of self-sacrifice and, in turn, Dyer writes in the moving final section of Homework, his mother was afflicted by a series of hairy moles across her body, one 'the size of a large casserole lid on her right hip', and the largest on her left arm. She underwent an operation after the war to remove the most visible section, but couldn't face any follow-ups. As a result she was, Dyer writes, marked 'as a kind of outcaste', fated to imperfection. 'This feeling,' Dyer writes, 'the opposite of the word we hear so often now, of entitlement… was not second nature to her: it was her first nature, part of the larger culture of deference and knowing one's place.' Dyer writes of a world only three generations removed, but this aspect can seem almost pre-modern. 'It's that historical change,' Dyer tells me. 'If you think of people of my parents' age, then of course they're going to think like that, whereas for all sorts of reasons now we feel things can be made better. I'm really conscious of this in LA: it's got to the ludicrous extent of the perfectibility of the individual at the expense of the society. It's just incredible where we lived, the number of gyms we were surrounded by: you can get the perfect body, you can get the perfect everything, really, partly by being at the gym, partly by surgery. And as a result you can sink into total despair about something else!' Whereas postwar England prioritised the perfectibility of the society at the expense of the individual? 'Yes, indeed. To exaggerate somewhat – I talk about my dad's lack of interest in everything – he sort of almost didn't have much of a 'self', really… They had so little agency. By the end of my dad's life, his agency was reduced to just saving money, recycling teabags endlessly.' This lack of interests, lack of culture, became a cleavage between father and son as Dyer enjoyed the social mobility that his parents willed him on to. 'My increasing sense… of part of my life being incommunicable,' he writes of his bookish teenage self, 'consolidated the habit of communicating less and less of what was important to my parents.' And this more bitter aspect of self-advancement is recalled tenderly but unsparingly by Dyer. 'We just gradually accepted this sort of silence settling between us about certain things. Such big parts of my life were incommunicable… If I'd had a brother or sister, then maybe the gap would have shrunk in a way; things would have been normalised. As it was, it just felt that we were in this kind of weird experiment.' Dyer was taking part in an experiment: the experiment of the meritocracy. Oxford overwhelmed his parents: 'We went for lunch when they visited and it was all a bit uncomfortable because they were so… deferential, and obviously feeling well out of their routine life. We so rarely went to restaurants, even that was a bit unusual.' The life Dyer chose after university – 'living on the dole in a slum in Brixton' and thereby entering a sort of welfare-leisure class – only broadened this distance from his parents. But it was during this Brixton period that Dyer discovered writers like Raymond Williams and EP Thompson, the cultural critic and historian whose famous lines on class epigraph and epilogue Homework. 'They're so important to me because they explain the process I had been through, and therefore they explained who I was. The crucial thing with this book, I think, is that there's nothing particularly interesting about my life, except to me. But it's interesting to tell my story precisely because it illustrates or embodies a larger social history.' These days, in his Ladbroke Grove pomp, Dyer makes no pretension to being working class any longer (that would be 'a delusion', he says). But, like so many English people, class pride and class resentmentcloud his peripheral vision. He tells me the story of how, when his 'upper-middle-class' wife's parents once came to visit and met his downstairs neighbours, he 'invented this whole pointless errand, just so I could really affirm to them that these were Rebecca's parents. I couldn't bear them to think that was the world I came from.' 'It's daft,' he says, and he's quite right. But it's the kind of pathology – and the kind of comedy – that might only make sense in England. 'It's not even a thing to which we can ascribe any motives, because it's just my DNA, really… Class is part of your DNA here; it's almost a biological part of one's being.' As our conversation goes on, it becomes clear that Dyer's life isn't just different from his parents'. It's the opposite. His father left England to fight in war; Dyer left it to write books. His parents had an extraordinary 'capacity for patience' and 'acceptance'; he is a 'raging inferno of impatience' with 'no capacity for acceptance'. Where they were private, self-secluded, he is warm and sociable. (At a reading I attended two days before our meeting, Dyer was greeted with a mixture of affection and professional envy.) He's had a good time. No room of his house exists to remain unused: thoughtfully curated, symmetrically styled, it is yet another form of self-expression. This is more than a lifestyle; it's a generational creed. And as young life becomes more static and straitened, it's one that begins to look as historical as that two-up, two-down in Cheltenham. If his life seems historical, Dyer is semi-conscious of his age: 'It sounds old, doesn't it?' he says. 'But I was conscious of this important book to be written… I really feel a great sense of relief that I've done this because I really was the only person capable, the perfect person to choose, to write this story.' This story? The story of the historical process, the peculiarities of the English, the lost promise of a postwar Jerusalem? 'No,' he says. 'Me!' 'Homework: A Memoir' is out now. Buy on [See also: Britain's new-build nightmare] Related
