Paul GlynnCulture reporter
BBC Pictures
Amelia Bullmore and Rosalie Craig play two members of the rock band
Sally Wainwright has said she aimed to create an “uplifting” portrayal of midlife, including the menopause, through the story of a female rock band in her new TV series Riot Women.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on Thursday, the Happy Valley writer said the show, which starts on Sunday, draws from her own midlife experiences.
“It’s very personal for me this,” she said. “It’s a lot about what I was going through at what [actress] Tamsin [Greig] very eloquently called ‘the middle squeeze’.”
She added: “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.”
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Lorraine Ashbourne, Sally Wainwright, Rosalie Craig, Joanna Scanlan, Tamsin Greig and Amelia Bullmore attended a recent launch for the show
She continued: “It’s about women who find something very creative and very engaging to do together and how it changes their lives.”
Riot Women tells the tale of five menopausal women who form a punk rock band to take part in a local talent contest.
It features stage and screen star Rosalie Craig as the chaotic Kitty Eckersley, alongside an ensemble cast of bandmates including Friday Night Dinner star Greig, Gentleman Jack’s Amelia Bullmore, Lorraine Ashbourne from Alma’s Not Normal and The Thick of It comic actress Joanna Scanlan.
Together the women foster a sense of solidarity and address their experiences candidly.
Wainwright, the Bafta-winning writer from Huddersfield, said she’d always wanted to write something as a sort of tribute to the 1970s musical drama Rock Follies.
She started to think about it properly about 10 years ago when she working on the one-off BBC drama To Walk Invisible, about the lives and literary achievements of the Brontë sisters.
“At around that time, my mum started to develop dementia, and I felt I was being pulled in so many different directions,” she explained to presenter Anita Rani.
“I still had two boys at home, one just about to go to university, the other one thinking about what he was going to do, education wise.”
She added: “You know that adage about if something needs doing, ask a busy woman?… I was that woman who just was being expected lots of – in a good way. You’re often at the height of your career.
“And so you’ve been pulled in all sorts of directions and balancing a huge amount of things, and in the middle of that the menopause started.”
She noted how along with hot flushes, brain fog and a low mood, it had brought with it a kind of “low self esteem that you don’t expect”.
“It just seemed well worth writing about,” she said, noting how it had been like “therapy” to do so.
Rosalie Craig as Kitty Eckersley in the show
The writer felt it was neccessary and useful for the cast to learn to play their instruments and perform live for the series, on songs such as Seeing Red and Just Like Your Mother.
Craig – who starred in Stephen Sondheim’s Company on the West End – told the same programme it was “phenomenal” to be asked to portray the carefree and at-times shameless frontwoman, Kitty.
“She’s constructed somebody who doesn’t have a filter, and that’s partly because of what she’s been through in life, and being the victim of aggression,” said Craig.
“She faces the world like that, with two fists,” she went on. “She exorcises herself through the use of song, which was really brilliant to do.”
Riot Women begins BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday 12 October at 21:00 BST.
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