We all had a Riot thanks to Sally's amazing writing

Huddersfield screenwriter Sally Wainwright, Joanna Scanlan, Rosalie Craig, Tamsin Greig, Lorraine Ashbourne and Amelia Bullmore discuss why menopause and punk rock works

- By YOLANTHE FAWEHINMI

SALLY Wainwright conceived the idea to write a story about a rock band, made up of menopausal women, about 10 years ago.

But at the time, the 62-year-old Huddersfield screenwriter was busy creating her Bafta-winning TV series Happy Valley.

So she decided to let the ideas for her new BBC One 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 Wainwright, whose first original drama was At Home With The Braithwaites, 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 - based in Hebden Bridge.

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