FIVE MENOPAUSAL WOMEN TURN INTO PUNK ROCKERS IN SALLY WAINWRIGHT'S NEW DRAMA RIOT WOMEN

BY YOLANTHE FAWEHINMI

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IT was around 10 years ago that Sally Wainwright first conceived the idea to write a story about a rock band, made up of menopausal women.

But at the time, the 62-year-old British screenwriter was busy creating her Bafta-winning TV series Happy Valley. So she decided to let the ideas for her new BBC1 drama, Riot Women, “germinate and cook for a while” instead.

“It’s good, because I've gone through things that have become good copy in the end,’ admits Sally, whose first original drama At Home With The Braithwaites, hit our screens some 25 years ago.

“Riot Women is quite personal to me; it’s autobiographical. I do feel like there is a lot of me in Joanna Scanlan’s character, Beth. So it's been a cathartic and therapeutic experience.

“It’s about women of a certain age, and it’s about menopause, but it’s also about the things that happen that aren’t necessarily to do with the menopause. It’s about the swings and arrows of life.

“For me, it was about my mum getting dementia. That was one of the things I wanted to write about. But I wanted to write about that age in a way that was uplifting, interesting, and that would grab people's attention.

“So the idea of the rock band was a separate thought about how you can put all the difficult things that happen to you into some sort of creativity - as I was doing with writing a TV series - by forming a rock band.”

Riot Women follows five menopausal women - a teacher, a police officer, a pub landlady, a midwife, and a shoplifting freeloader - living in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.

Thanks to a local talent contest, they decide to forma punk rock band, and suddenly find they have a lot to say about being middle-aged women navigating the ebbs and flows of life.