The Change, series 2 review: unapologetic about burying its feet in the soil and communing with birds
Have you started your own Linda's Ledger yet? In series one of Bridget Christie's The Change (Channel 4), 50-year-old, menopausal Linda (played by Christie) revealed to her ungrateful husband and teenage children that she had been keeping ledgers of all the unreciprocated chores she had done around their Swindon home. It amounted to 6.5m minutes – roughly six-and-a-half years of thankless domestic drudgery – and Linda announced that she was taking some of that time back. She mounted her old Triumph motorbike and headed to the Forest of Dean to rediscover herself.
Which she did, spectacularly, winning over the sceptical, insular rural oddbods to the extent that she became the local town's first ever 'Eel Queen' at the annual festival (a role that had only ever been an Eel King before). The appearance of husband Steve (Omid Djalili) in the final seconds of the first series, however, has thrown Linda's new life into a spin – she had told the locals she was unmarried and childless – and she now stands accused of 'maternal deception' and faces banishment from the forest.
If that all sounds supremely pagan, it's because it is. The show is a blend of English folklore, folk music, ritual, tradition and eccentricity, with shades of Detectorists and Jez Butterworth's hit stage play Jerusalem (as well as Toby Jones and Tim Crouch's brilliant but cruelly overlooked Don't Forget the Driver). Appropriately, the second series is co-directed by Mackenzie Crook, who created Detectorists and starred in Jerusalem, and these six episodes feel more comfortable in their own skin than the first run. The Change no longer seems to be apologising for burying its feet in the soil and communing with birds.
It's the more prosaic matter of housework that sets the second series in motion, as the women of the area learn about Linda's Ledgers. Soon, the local stationery shops have run out of notebooks and women are queuing up at Linda's caravan to ask about the rules. Is laughing at his bad jokes a chore? Is sex? En masse, women down tools, forcing men to pick up the slack and the whole thing takes on the pleasing air of an off-kilter Greek play. In one lovely moment, the local men go on a sex strike in protest, only to find that their wives are delighted. Je Suis Linda, they say.
As befits modern TV comedy, it's not laugh-a-minute, but The Change is a beguiling and unusual thing (wrapped in the traditions of British sitcom) with a language and rhythm all of its own. Occasionally Christie's roots as a stand-up are revealed, as the show slips into the didactic ('Did you know that…?'), but there is so much verve and zeal in the writing that you can forgive it. In a superb cast, Jim Howick, as a disenfranchised misogynist, and Paul Whitehouse, as the pub bore, stand out. Both characters felt a little cartoonish in the first series, but here Christie imbues them with a sadness and dislocation that feels utterly real. Linda's revolution wouldn't just benefit women.
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