A Hot Flush:The Change.

When Linda, who's just turned fifty, visits her doctor (a nice cameo from Richard Durden) worrying she may have early onset dementia she describes how she's feeling in some detail and finds out, the name of the show's quite a big clue, she's going through the menopause.

Channel 4's The Change (written by Bridget Christie who stars as Linda and directed by Al Campbell) isn't, however, only about the menopause. The menopause simply acts as a backdrop for a quirky, gently funny, and often sweet story about women throughout history and their lot. How they've been treated by men, how they've been treated by society, and how they treat each other.

As such, the vast majority of the characters are women and even the soundtrack (Shirley Collins, Karen Dalton) is provided entirely by female artists. This is a series that, quite easily, passes the Bechdel test. On discovering she is menopausal, Linda, a mother of two, decides to use 'the change' to make changes in her life.

She wants to be more than just a mother, more than just a wife, and she doesn't want to have to clear up constantly after men like husband Steve (Omid Djalili) - who tells her, at her own fiftieth birthday party, that she's "well fit ... for your age". Linda, after years of looking after others, wants to put her needs first for once.

So she takes her old Triumph motorbike for a ride through the Forest of Dean with the hope of finding a time capsule in a tree she placed it in when she was a child. The trouble is there are a lot of trees in the Forest of Dean. There are also a lot of characters and it's not long before Linda is, not always by choice, interacting with them.

She meets the eel sisters, Agnes (Susan Lynch) and Carmel (Monica Dolan), whom she hopes to let a "luxury" caravan from. The eel sisters have been "proudly serving eels and mash to men" from a shack in the woods that's been providing that service for over 170 years. 

She meets Tony (Paul Whitehouse) in the local pub. He sits down to join her despite her being upfront about not wanting him to. She meets Joy (Tanya Moodie) who presents a local radio show about feminist issues and she also meets The Verderer (Jim Howick) who does a show on the same station but comes from a very different angle. The Verderer angrily rants about feminism, Africans with AIDS, Woman's Hour, and snowflakes.

You know the type. Then there's Ryan (Sonny Charlton). Ryan serves in the cafe the radio station broadcasts from and is gender neutral. Quite surprisingly, he turns out to be The Verderer's nephew. Then there's Jerome Flynn (yes that one) as a Pig Man who lives in a cave in the woods, looks after boars, and looks like Crocodile Dundee. Linda and Pig Man strike up a moving friendship.

There's plans afoot to build a road through the forest and that's of concern to many locals but an even bigger issue seems to be the upcoming eel festival and the plan to replace the traditional eel king with an eel queen. Linda doesn't quite let on exactly who she is to the locals but that's made difficult by the fact her no nonsense sister Siobhain (Liza Tarbuck) keeps ringing her and shouting at her for abandoning her family.

But Linda isn't ready to return just yet. For years she's made a list of every chore she's carried out and how much time each one took out of her life and she is determined to claw at least a small percentage of that time back. So Townmouse (as the eel sisters take to calling her) spends her time having quiet pints in the local pub, reading Simone De Beauvoir and Kate Muir, and trying to find both the fabled tree and the historical time capsule.

There's a nice folkloric vibe to the whole thing and there's some decent jokes in there too. The Incredible Hulk, announces Linda, is the only menopausal role model in the history of television and film, a discussion about a sheep made of cheese, The Verderer citing the reason for food poverty being that poor people spend their money on "fags and gnomes", and a cat speed dating event.

There's a good Ant'n'Dec joke, another good one about death by auto-asphyxiation (!), and when Tony feigns concern about Linda sitting alone in a pub he lists places where women may be in danger of being raped:- "hot air balloon, ghost train, in space". There's also a remembrance of a long ago local contest to find the local man with the biggest willy - and what he was then demanded to do with that willy.

So it's pretty silly in places, dark in others. More than that it's sweet and even quite touching. Bridget Christie has managed to make a comedy about menopausal women and women in general that is neither patronising nor preachy. That made a change.