If you’re a midlife woman who recognises the monumental struggle of being sandwiched between the needs of your children and your ageing parents, all while being banjaxed by the menopause, then BBC One’s Riot Women is for you.
Even if you don’t identify with being a midlife, menopausal woman, Riot Women is still for you – so few of this demographic are represented on our TV screens, the show will offer an interesting insight into an invisible group who need to work extra hard to be whoever they want to be.
The six-part series airs from Sunday, October 12, and for writer Sally Wainwright, the show is very personal. On a basic level, Riot Women is about five menopausal women who form a punk band to help them yell through their difficult emotions.
On a deeper level, the show has more relatable themes than you can shake a stick at, and is an almost direct portrayal of Sally’s own menopause experience and midlife juggling. It also gives a realistic snapshot of the unseen challenges faced by women of a certain age, with some excellent original music thrown in for good measure.
Riot Women doesn’t shy away from the impact of a life dominated by everyone’s needs but your own, while hormones do their best to make everything else even more unbearable.
Sally Wainwright feels passionately about giving voices to midlife women (Happy Valley is just one of the excellent examples of this). Her first-hand knowledge of the struggle of being pulled between family life and the needs of ailing parents shines through in the script.
According to Radio Times, Sally’s husband left her after 29 years of marriage, just after her mother was diagnosed with dementia. She cared for their two sons, who were on the brink of major decisions relating to their education at the time, and she looked after her mother until she died six years after her dementia diagnosis.
It’s her experience with looking after somebody with dementia that inspired Sue Johnston and Anne Reid’s characters in the show – they both play mothers of band members whose minds are slowly deteriorating.
If you’re worried that Riot Women might be slightly downbeat and leave the peri or non-menopausal women out there terrified of what ‘the change’ might bring, don’t worry – it’s not like that at all.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour, Sally reassured viewers, “It’s just about midlife – menopause is just an aspect of that – and I wanted to find a way of writing about this part of your life in a way that was uplifting and engaging and interesting.”
(Image credit: BBC/Drama Republic Ltd/Matt Squire)
She explained that through the midlife juggle, the menopause starting in the middle of it all was almost one thing to balance too many for her at the time.
Amid hot flushes, poor memory, and a low mood, the writer experienced a “low self-esteem that you don’t expect”. She added, “It just seemed well worth writing about,” and she put the script together instead of getting therapy.
Although her own menopause experience provided a lot of material to use for the Riot Women characters and storylines, Sally admits to not being very musical – although she did go full method and learned to play the drums in solidarity with the actresses in her show.
Real-life Brighton band ARXX [Arrows in Action] were brought on board to write the original music for the series – they penned the song, Seeing Red among others. Sally also took HRT for the first time, to experience its effects firsthand in a further act of solidarity. Sally concludes, poignantly, “As ARXX wrote in Seeing Red, if the menopause happened to blokes, we’d be getting HRT from Tesco.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.womanandhome.com ’
