The change
Please don’t attack me, ladies. I’m just quoting a scene from television. It made me laugh, but that was an accident and I’m sorry, okay?
A 50-year-old woman named Linda goes to her GP and tells him she thinks she has “early onset dementia and osteoporosis, ringing in my ears when I’m stressed, anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease and a strange condition.” mental disorder in which nouns are lost.’
The doctor asks, “How’s your mood?”
She yells, “FINE!! HOW ARE YOURS?’
Bridget Christie’s menopause sitcom The Change (Chapter 4) is packed with themes, storylines, and grievances when Linda has symptoms. But it’s also generously filled with jokes, which makes up for its bagginess.
Bridget Christie’s (pictured) menopause sitcom The Change (chapter 4) is packed with themes, storylines and grievances as Linda has symptoms
In the new series, Bridget Christie plays a 50-year-old woman named Linda who leaves her husband and two teenage children
Linda walks out on her husband and two teenage kids after they leave her to clean up the mess from her own birthday party (although, in fairness, her useless husband, Steve, promises to do the dishes in the morning).
She sets off on her motorcycle to a favorite vacation spot from her childhood in the Forest Of Dean, where she once hid a time capsule in a tree, and begins befriending the locals.
The cast is superb, led by Liza Tarbuck as Siobhain, Linda’s anti-feminist sister, who leaves a series of angry phone calls demanding to be a housewife again: ‘Come home! The kids said Steve stinks already.’
In fact, so many talented comedic actors have popped up that sometimes it feels like Bridget just left them to their own devices.
Monica Dolan and Susan Lynch play a pair of sisters who run an eel-and-mash stand in the woods, who converse in mystical rural banter like escaped fugitives from a horror movie directed by Thomas Hardy.
Jerome Flynn is Pig Man, an eloquent and mournful recluse who dropped out of the rat race to live in a cave, and who seems likely to be Linda’s new love interest.
Jerome Flynn (right) plays Pig Man, an eloquent, mournful recluse who stepped out of the rat race to live in a cave
Paul Whitehouse plays a lovable old lech named Tony who attacks Lind in the pub
Paul Whitehouse has the most fun as a lovable old lech named Tony, straight out of The Fast Show, who makes a habit of attacking Linda in the pub.
‘You shouldn’t sit here alone, pretty lady like you,’ he lurks at her, without the slightest expectation of success. For Whitehouse, the appeal of the character could be Tony’s sideline as a nude model in art classes.
Some of the full frontal portraits are pinned up in the village pub. How lifelike they are, I have no idea, but I bet he took them home when filming was over.
The Vikings: Invasion
Being a nude model in medieval art classes can be deadly unpleasant, as Dr. Xand van Tulleken discovered in The Vikings: Invasion (Ch5).
The sloop robbers turned their victims into human sculptures with a gory practice called “blood eagle,” in which the skin and muscles of a captive’s back were cut apart to form wings.
TV doctor Dr. Xand van Tulleken (pictured) presents a new, low budget documentary called The Vikings: Invasion (Ch5)
Dr. Xand van Tulleken (pictured) throws himself into combat training, donning a coat of mail while using an ax to smash a melon
This low-budget documentary featured a few gory shots of blood-spattered reenactors, repeated over and over.
Why Xand presented it wasn’t clear: he’s known as a TV doctor and his previous shows delving into the past had a medical theme, such as the plague or cholera epidemics.
The facts were well laid out and if you only knew that story about King Canute’s tides, this was an education. And Xand threw himself into combat training, putting on a chain mail shirt and smashing a melon with an axe.
But how would he like it when historians fight back and start doing hospital shows? No one wants to see a series called Simon Schama On The Menopause.