The Change we all needed
Bridget Christie's wonderful Channel 4 sitcom ends its first series.
Bridget Christie’s The Change ends its first series tonight on Channel 4.
It began with an avalanche (of Tupperware) and it ends tonight with eel children, Morris dancers and joyful transitions all round.
The wife and mother roles usually occupied by a 50-year-old woman on TV were left hanging in the wardrobe as Linda Jenkins (Christie) headed off on her motorbike in search of buried treasure. She was just a person on a quest and that felt completely revolutionary.
She went back to nature and a place of childhood holidays, searching for the person she was before the responsibilities of adult womanhood kicked in and she disappeared underneath them. Back to a time when she dangled from ropes and lived in her imagination.
Christie joked at the screening to launch the show that it was just the years between 13 and 50 she’d found most tricky. Now, coming out the other side of the breeding years, she said she felt truly liberated. She proudly announced she’d stopped bleeding months ago.
Then she said something so incredibly touching, it stopped me in my tracks. She said she felt now like she did when she was a child. How wonderful.
At the show’s launch, the first three episodes were introduced by two dances from Boss Morris dance troupe who also feature in the show. They bounced around the stage, waving their hankies, whooping and lunging, enjoying what their limbs could do to merge with the music. In the second more boisterous routine, they fought with sticks, the pitch and volume building until the women were barking and throwing their heads back.
That image repeated in my head as I watched those first three episodes. Perhaps, the sound women would make if we truly expressed what a lifetime of patriarchy does to our insides?
The response in the room was loudly appreciative, a mixture of press and friends delighted for Christie’s sudden move to the front after years doing stand-up and cameos in other people’s shows.
But loudest of all were the women. The conversations afterwards, as people spilled out into the boiling hot day, were all about hysterectomies and incontinence and hot sweats. No one was embarrassed to say it out loud. For a minute we had no shame.
We’re told we run on moon time, our cycles dictated by the turning of the earth, our vaginas the potential gateways to life itself. And it feels like we forget who we are and the power we have amid the daily noise made by men.
“You’d look nicer if you smiled.” We’re so completely used to being seen through the male gaze, three episodes of this show shown to a room of about 150 just seemed to dissolve that filter temporarily and we could all see it, like turning the lights on.
Of course this is what Christie is good at, gently and curiously drawing your attention to the absurdities of patriarchy. She does it with her stand-up and her writing and now with Linda, her most effective tool yet.
The Change isn’t a vengeful roar at the ignorant workman hanging off the scaffolding. It’s not a giant eye-roll at the male species at all. There’s something so generous in what Christie is saying with this show.
It’s a practical response to our squashed womanhood.
Go back to the moon and the trees and listen to the birds.
Really listen.
I need another series. This cannot be the end.
It feels like the beginning.