Sally Wainwright has brought the spotlight back to West Yorkshire with Riot Women — her latest BBC drama filmed in and around Hebden Bridge.
The creator of Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax swaps crime and heartbreak for punk guitars and midlife rebellion in a story about five women who rediscover their spark through music, friendship, and a good dose of chaos. All episodes of Riot Women are available now on BBC iPlayer, with the first episode airing on BBC One on Sunday 12 October.
Wainwright describes the show as “a drama about women of a certain age who are at various stages of going through the menopause, but it’s not just about the menopause.”
“For me personally, it’s things like elderly parents who start to need you more than you need them, marriages breaking down, adult children that still need some support, demands at work – so you’re being pulled in lots of different directions and in the middle of all of that you’re having the menopause and you’re feeling like you’re disappearing. I wanted to try and write about that but in a way that’s positive, uplifting, and about claiming your life back.”
It’s classic Wainwright territory, which is rooted in realism, but never bleak. The series centres on a teacher, a police officer, a pub landlady, a midwife, and a self-described “freeloader” who form a punk rock band to enter a local talent contest. But what begins as a small act of defiance soon turns into something far deeper.
“It’s uplifting, I hope!” says Wainwright. “There’s a lot of humour in it and a lot of laughs. The dialogue is nice and buoyant and the actors certainly deliver that. It’s got a huge dark story all the way through that affects two of the central Riot Women. It’s kind of on a level of a Greek tragedy what happens to them, what befalls them, and what they discover about themselves and each other. It’s very powerful but very human, very joyous and celebratory too.”
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Wainwright, who was born in Huddersfield and lives in Calderdale, says returning to Hebden Bridge for Riot Women was a natural choice.
“It’s a story that could really be set anywhere to be honest, but I do like writing in my own vernacular because I think I can get more comedy out of the language if I’m writing in my own dialect and you can’t beat the landscape in Hebden Bridge. Riot Women is even more Hebden-centric than Happy Valley was, as we filmed a lot around there for this series. It just looks gorgeous on camera, and you get a great sense of place which I think is important in a TV show.”
As ever, Wainwright combines sharp writing with emotional depth and a deep sense her Yorkshire home.
“I just want to entertain people primarily; it’s always been what I’ve wanted to do,” she says. “I wanted to write about the menopause because I was going through it, it was interesting and something I hadn’t really thought about until it started to happen… I wanted to address how it can make you feel but also to present it in a way that is uplifting.”
