Latest news with #TheChange
Irish Post
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Post
Bridget Christie's ‘looking forward to' life on the road again as new tour announced
COMEDIAN Bridget Christie claims she is looking forward to life on the road again as she announced a new stand-up tour. The second-generation Irish woman, who was born in Gloucester to parents from counties Roscommon and Leitrim, will be back on stages across the country when her Jacket Potato Pizza show kicks off in 2026. Bridget Christie has announced a new show (Pic: Natasha Pszenicki) The new live show will take her across the UK from January to March, and Christie is pretty excited about it. 'I am very much looking forward to eating motorway services food again and picking my favourite roundabouts,' she said this week. 'Last year Plymouth won.' The news follows the second successful series of Christie's sitcom The Change airing on Channel 4. Christie wrote, executive produced and stars in the show, which centres on fifty-something heroine Lisa – who, after being diagnosed with the menopause, finds herself indulging in a mid-life crisis which sees her drop her home life for an adventure in the wilderness of the Forest of Dean. The Bafta-nominated comedy saw Christie win the Debut Writer award at the New Voice Awards 2024 in recognition of the first series' success and Best Actor at The Edinburgh TV Awards. Jacket Potato Pizza is Bridget's fourteenth live show. For tour listings click here. See More: Bridget Christie, Jacket Potato Pizza, The Change, Tour
Irish Independent
29-05-2025
- Health
- Irish Independent
Máire Treasa Ní Cheallaigh: One thing about the menopause is clear – women don't want to be defined by it
Once upon a time, nobody spoke about 'The Change'. Then advertisers who had long ignored women over 50 realised they had money, so they created a new insecurity. Welcome to the era of 'estropreneurship' and the monetisation of menopause. We've moved from omerta to blaming every kind of physical ailment and anxiety on it.
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Madeleine West gives birth to seventh child at 45
Madeleine West has welcomed her seventh child. The former Neighbours actor shared a photo of her newborn on social media Sunday night, captioned, "Earthside at last... and utterly perfect." West, who played Dee Bliss on the Australian soap in the early 2000s, was met with a raft of supportive comments from famous friends, with former Home and Away actress Tammin Sursok posting, "Congratulations mama!" West didn't disclose the baby's name or gender. West, who is already a mother to six children with her ex-husband celebrity chef Shannon Bennett, announced her surprise pregnancy on Instagram in January. "Whoops!" she began her post, alongside a selfie of her growing bump. "Thought it was perimenopause, I thought wrong! And I couldn't be happier. "Not too sure about the title geriatric mum but here we are, and I'm winding back a little to grow this little surprise package I've dubbed 007 - baby number 7, couldn't help myself." West's birth comes weeks after the Byron Bay-based actress penned an emotional article for Australia's Stellar newspaper supplement. "I'm officially up the duff and a certifiable hot mess: equal parts elated, terrified, and very, very alone," West said. "Don't get me wrong, I'm surrounded by a supportive community of incredible women, but many are embarking on that mysterious and frequently ferocious hot-flash-fest that is menopause, aka The Change, while it seems the only change on my horizon is changing nappies."
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Bridget Christie on brain fog, flirting, and why she won't be taking a lover: ‘My heart is full. I am open to it, but I'm not looking for it'
Is it a pigeon-hole, Bridget Christie asked to be photographed in, or is it a box? Either way, it's some pretty trenchant visual messaging: whatever society wants to do with middle-aged women, Christie is done with it. It was also a chance for the 53-year-old to dress up as Kate Bush, recreating her 1978 shoot by Gered Mankowitz. And Christie loves dressing up. She did a whole show dressed as Charles II. The actor, writer and comedian is playful: she has way more than the usual number of funny facial expressions; her chat is peppered with silly, surreal diversions. Making people laugh is her thing, she says. 'It motivates me, it helps me navigate the world, it's like a drug.' Also her thing? Shaking injustice like a snow globe, and saying, 'Guys, guys – there's a better way to do this.' There was her 2013 Edinburgh comedy award-winning show A Bic for Her, in which she skewered everything from the marketing of a pastel-coloured Biro to the geopolitical significance of violence against women. Her first Radio 4 series, Bridget Christie Minds the Gap, was silly but very much about feminism. Her second, Utopia, in 2018, took on all the crushing events of the world, from Brexit to Kim Jong-un to the climate crisis. Now, she has found a home on Channel 4 with The Change, her Bafta-nominated comedy drama. It's about menopause – women in midlife, raging against the machine, sloughing off their domestic servitude – and centred on long-married Linda, played by Christie, clawing back the millions of minutes she has spent doing drudge work for others. The scenarios are within the envelope of regular sitcom, but the execution has an almost fairytale surrealism – as Christie describes, 'it's like science fiction, magic realism, a western, a comedy, a tragedy'. The second season opens on a menopause joke: Linda, in the middle of a rousing speech on self-empowerment, forgets a word. It's a simple one, but important; nothing else will do. The word is 'log'. 'There are so many words, aren't there?' Christie says, having forgotten a word today. 'Too many. It's the nouns!' We meet in a cafe in Stoke Newington, London, where she has lived for most of her adult life. She is warm and relaxed, but unobtrusive, softly spoken. We have bumped into each other before, doing feminism about the place, and I've always been struck by a quality she has, as if she's fighting shyness, doesn't really want any of the limelight, but she's going to make this remark anyway, because it's funny. Linda isn't Christie. 'I've lived an incredibly privileged life. Bloody drama school! Doing standup!' she says. There are similarities, though. Christie, fine-boned and ethereal, with the enchanted curly hair of the pre-Raphaelite sisterhood, even dresses a lot like Linda, in a waxy outdoor jacket and vividly colourful leggings: random and ready for anything, from yoga to living off-grid. She also shares Linda's core quality, which is not – contrary to all the shorthand around this show – 'being menopausal'. It's that will to amuse. 'From my earliest memory, I would pursue that to the end of the Earth,' she says. Christie was born in 1971 – the last of nine (!) children to two originally Irish parents, who had met in London and then moved to the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, when her dad got a job with Wall's ice-cream. She says her siblings are 'all really clever, really great'. Only she and one sister, Annie, went into the creative industries; a couple of her brothers went to polytechnic, a couple joined the RAF. She remembers one time, early in primary school, enjoying the lessons: 'We did a class which was about expression or something. 'What are you feeling?' I remember her talking to us like we were human beings. And thinking, 'I'm feeling happy because the sun's coming through, I can see the dust on the light, and there's a big old telly here. I remember looking at my skirt, thinking, 'I love this lesson.' Then I remember education getting colder as I got older.' She left school at 15 with no qualifications, shaped more by the landscape around her in the Forest of Dean than her teachers. The Change is set in this same eccentric pocket of woodland. 'No one's done up. The vehicles we use – there's an old Chevy, there's a Triumph. They could only be in the forest, and I felt like I was recreating a world that I'm trying to get back to.' While Christie was certain about where the show would be set, she had reservations about centring it around menopause, which a lot of us in the 50s age bracket would, I think, agree with. 'We're always reducing women's experiences to a set of biological processes – puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause. Guys don't have this.' And yet, '100% of humans will at some point be affected by it. You're going to be living with somebody who's menopausal – your wife or your sister, everyone knows someone. So the fact that it was so invisible, I found annoying. I also found the lack of shows about older people's experiences very annoying, because older people are just much more interesting, on the whole.' But it's not about hormones, or brain fog, and nor is it really about that buildup of marital and social resentment, even while chores – who does them, how they get done, who wishes they could live their lives again and never have shaken the crumbs out of a toaster – loom large. 'I do see women's time, a lot of it goes to nothing. Nobody sees us, we don't get awards, nobody thanks us. It's tricky, because I'm a comedian, and I don't want to make anything that's worthy. But I did really want to say, 'I know what you've been doing, and I'm thanking you.'' Really, it's about menopause as a retaking of destiny; imagine if, for whatever reason – call it hormones, call it wisdom – you were to stop clearing up after others, stop biting your tongue. What would that be like? Step one of rejecting domestic servitude is, of course, leaving your husband, which Linda does at the start of the first season, and it wasn't lost on critics on its release in 2023 that Christie must have been writing it at roughly the same time as she was getting divorced in real life. She and Stewart Lee weren't like the Posh and Becks of standup, in so far as they never noticeably leveraged each other's success or fame to create a kind of comic super-unit. But it was unusual for the comedy circuit to have a Mr and Mrs, both successfully gigging. They separated during the pandemic after being married for 15 years, and have two children together, 14 and 18. In the show, Linda and her husband, Steve – played with tremendous subtlety masquerading as unsubtlety by Omid Djalili – stay together. 'I wanted for it to not be anything to do with Steve, really, or to be a love story. It's not about that. It's about her relationship with herself, that human experience of finding yourself. I think losing yourself is a very common experience, regardless of age, gender or sexuality, or anything like that. You can be a teenager and not know who you are. You can not know at any age.' All that said, being in your 50s, 'it's a lot', she ventures. 'Being our age, kids leaving home, getting divorced, being single, coping with changes to your body. It's quite a lot.' The empty nest is slowly creeping up for Christie. She took her oldest to look around a university recently. 'He went to a talk, I just sat and had a coffee, and I was so excited for his life. And then I remembered being 18, and I felt melancholy. I thought, 'That is over for me now.' But then I stopped myself, because, no, it isn't. You can be excited for yourself as well.' The thing she fears most about getting older isn't physically ageing, 'although that's inconvenient. It's ageing mentally, it's getting stuck, and a little bit sour. I don't want to have an old brain. I remember my dad saying he always felt so young because he was always around young children.' Her parents started having children when they were 18, and would have been looking after at least a couple, sometimes a large number, of tiny ones, for the next 17 years. Plainly, Christie's plan to keep mentally agile can't involve having seven more children, so I suggest instead that she take a young lover. Her answer starts off highly reasonable, very mature. 'I'm really in a great place. I'm at this age now where I don't need a life partner, I don't need to have more children, I've got my job, so, whoever it is, it would have to be good. My heart is full. I am open to it, but I'm not looking for it.' Then she starts to recreate an impromptu romance workshop that erupted at a friend's wedding recently, when she mentioned she hadn't been on a date in years. 'A bunch of people were there – Daniel Kitson, James Acaster, Nish Kumar, Josie Long. James said, 'Tell us what you would do if someone here took your fancy.' And I said, 'OK. I would go up and say, 'Hello. You have piqued my interest.'' He said, 'Under no circumstances must you say that.' And I said, 'Why not? They will have done – they will have piqued my interest.' And he said, 'Just go up to someone and say, 'Would you like to go to a hotel and have sex?'' What? No! How depressing. That's the most horrific scenario. Is that what young people do?' She doesn't fancy the apps (with the caveat that some of her best friends met a spouse online). 'I've heard it's brutal. Attraction is about chemistry. You can't get it from 'Here is a series of things that this person is into. This is what this person looks like.'' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion But she's not really looking for love anyway. 'I had an enlightenment moment a couple of years ago – it's just me, actually. I really do believe that you've got to try and keep something for yourself when you're in a relationship, try and retain who you are as much as possible. Because we are all alone. I might head off for a walk at the weekend, on my own. And that's a great scenario – alone with my thoughts and in nature.' She has realised, she says, that being at ease with solitude is fundamental to being a sorted person, and being a sorted person is fundamental to being a good partner. 'Easier said than done, I know, but if you're coming in to a relationship, at this age, you should be bringing your sorted self.' She takes a breath. 'Do you want my complete relationship history?' she says, and why not, yes I do. 'I had the same boyfriend from 15 to 23, that was the biker. We bought a house when I was 18, we went to music festivals, we rode to the Welsh mountains, we rode to France. Do you like France?' Why, yes, I do. 'I was single between 23 and 28 – that's a good chunk, isn't it?' These were the drama school years. After a few white lies (about her age – 15 –and her qualifications – which were zero), she got her first job as an editorial assistant at the Gloucester Citizen, but walked out because the editor asked her to get him a McDonald's without saying please. In her early 20s, she got a grant from the council to study drama, but couldn't afford it even with that, so applied for and won a scholarship to the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts, in London. 'Then, I graduated. And from 26 to 50, when I cast myself as Linda, I did not get a single acting job.' She thinks it was partly because, 'I don't know whether this is an affliction or a curse, but my brain automatically goes to the funny side. It sounds like I'm having some sort of episode, but I just feel so happy to be alive, and grateful, and I really enjoy everything. So in an audition scenario, if there's a room full of people staring at me, and I've not got a very good script, I will laugh.' Her agent had to explain to her at one point that it wasn't her job to internalise bad writing; her job was to make it good. There are also a lot of unspoken class barriers in the creative industries – she thinks that's got worse, not better. 'The way the arts now are, it's a pretty closed shop. If I were starting today, from my background, forget it. Unless you're really well connected, there's no way in.' Even in the 90s 'at drama school, people said to me, 'Network, network, network; because in this industry, it's pretty much who you know.' And I said, 'I absolutely refuse to believe that.' And I didn't network, and I didn't get any work.' She sounds simultaneously mock aghast at life and low-key amused by her own naivety. A Bic for Her, her breakthrough standup show, came out of one she did the previous year called War Donkey, 2012, in Edinburgh – broadly speaking, it was about the state of the world. It didn't flop, but 'I got a lot of shit', she remembers, for talking about feminism. 'A lot of, 'She's funny, but what a shame she has to be banging on about this.' And that annoyed me. I felt like I was being criticised for subject matter, and I don't think that's right. You can write about anything – you should be criticised on whether it worked or not. It was only 10 minutes of that set, and I said, 'I'm going to come back next year, and I'm going to do feminism for an hour. If they don't like it for 10 minutes, let's see how they like it for an hour.'' It's quite strange, looking back to that time, when a lot of culture foreshadowed the #MeToo movement – Laura Bates's Everyday Sexism, first as a hive-mind project, then as a book; Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman – but there were still so many prescriptions about where feminism belonged and where it didn't. Fine in a lecture hall, ladies, but don't bring your hectoring out to the pub where people are trying to enjoy themselves. I saw A Bic for Her when it transferred to London, and was surprised by how wide of the mark, how completely undescriptive, the reviews were. Like it or hate it, they mainly dealt in the topic: pastel pens 'for her'; violence against women in Afghanistan – were these good subjects for comedy? None of that really captured the playfulness and surrealism, the physicality of Christie's routine. Nevertheless, it marked a new level of recognition, and, from this point, she was in regular meetings with TV producers, batting around ideas that would eventually become The Change. Standup, though, is the work Christie still wants to be doing in her 80s. Describing the circuit in London, especially when she was starting out, in her 30s, she makes the mechanics of it sound stressful and lonely. 'I'd be travelling to gigs, and look through windows at people having dinner, or going out to the cinema. I don't get nervous any more, but for years, at five o'clock, the adrenaline would start. Especially if I was doing new material. And the kids were little. I'd think: 'What time's the babysitter coming?'' But, in the end, if your life's purpose is making people laugh, that's the best place for it: in a room full of people. 'Sometimes, I'll be being announced, and I'll not have a single idea about what I'm going to say, for 40 minutes, or two hours. And then you start speaking, and it's automatic, it's like muscle memory. It's the most extraordinary thing. The more relaxed you are, the better, because you're just so free. And you're not afraid of anything. You can go wherever you like.' A lot of Christie's words, on the page, look slightly melancholy, but the effect she creates in person is the absolute opposite of that – she's someone who believes the fates have delivered her to exactly where she was meant to be, liberated from gnawing, nonsense anxieties, alive to the possibilities of the future. I wonder if this might be the last taboo of menopause discourse. What if it was actually a change for the better? The second series of Bridget Christie's The Change is out now on Channel 4
The Guardian
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
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.
