Bridget’s on fire (and it’s not just the menopause!)

MARK WAREHAM

Bridget Christie

Who Am I?

Touring until December 9 ★★★★☆

The number of female comics of a certain age performing live stand-up is laughable. Traditionally it has started and ended with Jenny Eclair as the lone middle-ager making a mockery of the menopause. Recently, Dawn French has proved there’s life in the old dog yet. But Jo Brand no longer tours. Ditto Mel and Sue. Victoria Wood and Joan Rivers, RIP.

To that ridiculously short list can now be added the name of Bridget Christie, right, who, at 52, has decided it’s high time she outed herself as a raging menopausal maniac who is hot, hot, hot, but not in a good way.

Christie is not one to be trifled with. Realising that the only way to get a menopausal woman on to the television was to write a comedy series herself and then cast herself as the star of the show, that’s exactly what she did.

The result earlier this year was Channel 4’s The Change, an eccentric, somewhat surreal portrait of a frustrated suburban mother who escapes domestic drudgery by jumping on a motorbike and heading for the forest on a journey of self-discovery. (It’s an absolute hidden delight with lovely turns from Omid Djalili, Monica Dolan and Paul Whitehouse, and is still streamable on C4.)

Who Am I? acts as a companion piece, charting the lows and lows of a woman on the edge of the HRT abyss, suffering from overheating, brain fog, vaginal dryness and memory loss, with a brain operating at ten per cent. The menopause, she says, is still largely a taboo, despite it affecting ‘one in one women’!

Her children are continually embarrassed by her changing body, accusing her of breathing and swallowing too loudly. Raising kids, she says, is like being in an abusive relationship. ‘Enjoy the childbirth.

That’s the best bit!’

Christie’s comedy is always infused with staunch feminist values, but with the lightest of touches. Older readers will recall the stomping Left-wing harridan Millie Tant from Viz comic in the 1980s, an era when all feminists were automatically considered lesbians. Jo Brand memorably confronted the same attitudes. Now Christie (along with the younger Katherine Ryan) is the modern face of feminism in comedy, and one with enough bottle to call out Ricky Gervais on some of his hardcore views, ‘making the lives of transgender people that much harder’.

But she is too savvy to make this just a one-woman rant, howling at the moon. Instead, the laughter is liberating.

She no longer worries about looking attractive. ‘All I care about is my tomatoes and my cats,’ she declares. And anyway, women over 50 don’t have sex, do they, she argues, ‘cos if they did we would see it on TV and in films’.

So ladies, it’s time to embrace the change, throw away your oestrogen patches and catch Christie’s menopausal takedown in all its celebratory glory.