Sally Wainwright should be prescribed on the NHS as a form of HRT. Alongside oestrogen and progesterone tablets, patches, gels and sprays to counter the myriad ills female flesh is heir to, doctors could prescribe a weekly dose of Scott & Bailey for those who are just beginning to feel that Summat’s Up, moving on to Last Tango in Halifax for the lightly but definitely perimenopausal, followed by a daily hour of Gentleman Jack to alleviate more intense symptoms and culminating in a nightly binge of Happy Valley once you’re fully entangled in menopause’s proliferating tentacles and need to bring out the big guns before they drag you under for good.
Now we have an addition to the arsenal: her new drama Riot Women, about a quintet of menopausees facing the question of when all this shite is going to stop and how they are going to manage until it does.
First, we meet Beth (Joanna Scanlan), who has decided that the only answer to this question is to take her own life. A note is written to her beloved but thoughtless son, Tom (Jonny Green), and propped on the piano and she is getting prepared – when the phone rings. It’s her brother, Martin, selfish to the point of viciousness, calling to berate her for putting their mother in a home that will eat up the inheritance he was looking forward to instead of continuing to care for her by herself. Beth roars back at him, but not cathartically enough to turn her from her chosen path. She only stops trying to see her plan through when her friend Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne) rings. “D’you want to be in a rock band?”
And we’re off. The call has gone out to their friend Holly (Tamsin Greig) too. She has just ended 30 years in the police force by arresting a drunk and disorderly woman – further disoriented by a hot flush – in a supermarket and giving her a bed for the night as she has no home to go to. The next morning, Holly recognises the magnificently obstreperous felon as Kitty (Rosalie Craig), daughter of local gangster Keith. She will be even less delighted in episode two when Beth discovers Kitty doing karaoke in a bar and brings her along to the first band rehearsal as their new and soon indispensable singer. Though Holly has also invited her joyless sister, Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore), to play guitar so they are roughly equal on the potentially bad decision-makinge.
Add in a thick sprinkling of unrewarding children, parents at various stages of dementia, weak men, bad men, bosses who cannot or will not address the suffering of employees whose problems run deeper than hurt feelings, mounting physical problems in the face of medical indifference, a baby given up for adoption in the 90s and now looking for his birth mother and you have a rich and moreish stew that is offered up in generous portions. And it is, of course, in Wainwright’s customary manner, perfectly seasoned with humour, from the lightest (“Rocco was a tree in assembly. Before and after an explosion. It was heartbreaking”) to the darkest. Kitty was expelled from the posh school she was sent away to at 13 after her mother died and her father couldn’t stand the sight of her. “It was an education in all sorts of way. Apart from … education.”
Like all Wainwright’s best work (and work by the likes of Debbie Horsfield and Kay Mellor before her), Riot Women covers a lot of ground without getting bogged down or leaving the viewer feeling shortchanged. As the band fights to get into a fit state to play at the local fundraiser in six weeks’ time, Beth learns to stand her ground and fight against the invisibility that did so much to make her miserable. She bonds with Kitty partly through admiration of her talent and their shared interest in writing original material for the Riot Women (“Old Bags’ Department” was considered as a band name but ultimately vetoed) but also because she needs to mother, and Kitty, whatever she thinks, needs mothering.
It is a drama that, like Happy Valley, looks at the multitudinous roles women manage, the caring responsibilities that accumulate and how they evolve over a lifetime. Children leave home but never stop taking. Mothers become children and take some more. What do you do if you are caught between the two, alone, and no one is around to give you anything? You turn to your equally depleted friends, dig deeper and give what you can to each other. You become a self-supporting circle, which itself becomes a link in the chain that can keep an entire society going. There will be merry hell to pay when that breaks, of course, but TV with this sort of pedigree and cast will buy us a little more time.
