Why I've put my menopause on the telly

As Bridget Christie’s new TV show airs, she says it’s about time that women’s experience was shown in all its gore and glory

MY NEW Channel 4 comedy drama The Change is a love story. But it’s a story of self-love, and we don’t of ten tell those. Not when the woman is over 50, anyway. I wanted to write a show in which a middle-aged, working class, married mum and wife (Linda) decides to take back some of the time she’s spent doing “invisible” work around the house. She heads off on a journey of self-discovery and adventure to the Forest of Dean — and doesn’t have sex once she gets there. Not that I’m antisex, although I was brought up Catholic, but it was really important to me that this wasn’t a show about a break up, but about a woman’s relationship with herself.

Time is a big theme in the show — how we spend it and whose is more valuable. Linda’s chore ledger, in which she has been writing down all the housework she’s done over the past 25 years or so, and how long it’s taken her, becomes a metaphor for life and how we live it. The Forest of Dean, near where I grew up in Gloucester, is a breathtakingly beautiful part of the country and I’ve always wanted to film there, so The Change is a love letter to women and to the Forest of Dean. I really hope women and foresters don’t all hate it when it goes out, because then I’ll have to find somewhere else to go on holiday.