The Change
The Change is special – Bridget Christie is a visionary - ★★★★★
The second series of Christie's menopause sitcom is magical. It should be treasured
Written by Julia Raeside in The i on March 25th, 2025
In 2023, the first series of Bridget Christie’s The Change set out its stall as a sublime, heightened comic meditation on womanhood and aging, cut through with a bubbling anger about the loss of self that comes with familial duty. Linda (Christie) turned 50, started the menopause and was hit on the head by falling Tupperware, causing her to make a break for the Forest of Dean to find herself.
In this new series, we rejoin Linda where we left her: in the middle of the forest, devastated at the loss of the “mother tree” (a huge oak felled to clear the way for a new road) and her past finally catching up with her in the shape of husband Steve (Omid Djalili).
Linda’s personal crusade becomes universal as the women of the town begin to ask questions about “Linda’s Ledger”, her written tally of the minutes and seconds she’s spent doing chores for other people. Should sex go in the ledger, asks one. “If it felt like a chore,” she replies, baffled by her new role as reluctant feminist figurehead.
The women go on strike, leaving the men to fathom wiping for themselves. “Women’s strike brings scurvy and rats,” declares a newspaper billboard, renewing that delicious seam of absurdist humour that gives The Change its ticklish, warmly irreverent tone.
Christie’s genius lies in her ability to write a tub-thumper that never neglects the laughs. This is mirrored in Linda’s patient forbearance with town bore Tony (Paul Whitehouse) who insists things have gone “too far” while Linda gently myth-busts all the ignorant things he says.
The original cast all return, save for Monica Dolan as Carmel, who is ably replaced by alternative Eel sister, Theresa (Laura Checkley). She has a whale of a time as a newly-released convict and self-confessed witch able to talk with the birds. She’s paired with the beautifully droll Susan Lynch who returns as Eel sister, Agnes. The two of them sit puffing on pipes, talking matter-of-factly about witchcraft and hexes.
The history of female persecution and what little progress we’ve made since is a big theme this time. As the women take the upper hand, local radio DJ Joy (a deliciously cool Tanya Moodie) posits: “A witch is just a woman who knows her own power.”
Jim Howick’s furiously impotent Verderer leads the men in battle against their revolting wives. He says Linda’s manifesto encourages women to “abandon their children, practice witchcraft, destroy the patriarchy and become lezzers”. He almost screams the last bit. “Sounds brilliant. Where do I sign up?” smirks Linda.
And, blessedly, this series allows for far more of Liza Tarbuck as Linda’s truculent sister Siobhan, who comes to stay in the caravan in search of her own furlough from daily drudgery.
Also, for this series, Mackenzie Crook joins Christie as co-director, following the astonishing work of Al Campbell who gave series one its other-worldly look. Their combined styles bring Detectorists and The Change into the same universe, and Crook’s fondness for underground soil cross-sections as visual metaphor work well here to conjure the subterranean network of fungi linking the trees of the Forest of Dean.
But Crook’s involvement never seems to stifle the sheer originality of Christie’s voice. I can just imagine the production meetings where she outlined the new series: “lot of talk about mushrooms, a ghost witches’ supper, man in a scold’s bridle, ceremony of new life.” How often do we get to see a woman being an idiosyncratic visionary on television?
The Change is a tender, curious, hilarious treasure: a rare and special specimen that must be protected like the last mushroom of its kind in the forest.
Written by Julia Raeside in The i on 25th March 2025.
Filed Under: The Change, Review