The second series of Bridget Christie’s The Change starts tonight on Channel 4, in which she plays a 50-year-old woman, Linda, who experiences an existential crisis after starting the menopause. Leaving her family behind, she sets off on a pilgrimage to her childhood haunt of the Forest of Dean.

How does The Change's second series build on the first?

Well, Linda's definitely changed. One of the really important things we talked about, even before any scripts were commissioned, was at what point do we meet her? Originally, she was going to arrive in the forest having already gone on a journey and things would be shown in flashback. 

But I changed that to meeting her at a point at which she's not realised her full potential, she's still at 50 per cent. The first half of the first episode in the first series was Linda of the last 20 years. And by the time we got to the ad break, she'd made that first big jump, deciding to leave.

And then across the series, she's hidden a lot from the community in order to be seen as an individual, trying to figure out who she is again. The audience goes with her, you're seeing that development gradually. 

Into the first episode of the second series, it's still the same day. She was only Eel Queen that morning, has only been in the forest a matter of weeks ...

So this series is about her really finding out what she's about. She becomes a reluctant Messiah to the town's women, who are now starting their own ledgers of chores. She would never have put herself in that position when she was living in Swindon. Seeing more of Linda come out, getting more confident, that's been interesting for me to write and perform.

By episode five, she's aggressively wielding a rolling pin. That's quite a big journey she's gone on to get to that point. Also visually, in the themes and ideas of what I was able to achieve with the second series, I already planned a lot of it in the first. Building a world, setting things up, you have to hold a certain amount back. 

It looks different, Linda looks different, it's got a different vibe and energy.

The fact that she's getting more confident, is that mirroring how you're feeling about writing the series, becoming more daring?

I don't think I've become more daring because I've never really been risk-averse. With my early stand-up shows, I wasn't worried about things not working. And very often, they didn't! So I'm not sure that I'm taking more risks. 

The difference is that I'm all about the work, really. Whatever happens when it's out in the world is nothing to do with you. You've just got to write the thing you want to write, make it in the way you want to make it, and that's the end of your journey in terms of influence and how you feel about it.

I just don't see that Linda and I are in any way similar. I've been very lucky in my career and, you know, life. And apart from having two children and riding a motorbike, knowing The Forest of Dean very well, I'd say that's where the similarities end. I've had all these creative outlets, I've not felt invisible. But I feel like I know her in people I've met and observed. She's Everywoman, a relatable character.

But becoming a reluctant Messiah, is that perhaps channelling what happened after you won the 2023 Edinburgh Comedy Award with the feminism-focused A Bic For Her? Did you feel a pressure to represent 'feminist comedy', be a spokesperson almost? 

When I did War Donkey [in 2012], that show got a two star review and I was really criticised. Not for the content or the ideas. But for specifically talking about feminism. And that had been the first show I'd started talking about it.

Bridget in War Donkey

I remember being on Princes Street with [Daddy Issues creator] Danielle Ward. She'd also got a two-star review and we'd both been criticised for talking about feminism. 

Dan was saying: 'I don't think I'm coming back next year'. And I was like, 'well, if they don't like ten minutes, I'm going to do an entire hour! And they can give me one star!' 

To be criticised for talking about a subject, rather than how you talked about it! You can't say what a shame, they've talked about Ukraine, or they've talked about murder and rape. You've got to critique how it's delivered. So that really annoyed me and I didn't expect A Bic For Her to do at all well.

So going back to your earlier question, you've got to write from the heart. With authenticity, writing the thing that your want to see or you're really interested in or passionate about. 

I feel so lucky and privileged to have this job. I left school at 15 with no qualifications and did office jobs until I was 36. I did stand-up for 10 years before A Bic For Her, which was when I was 42. And then for the last eight years, I've been working on this, my first TV commission. So no, I don't feel like a spokesperson, that would seem really arrogant.

In 2013, feminism was perhaps a subject matter that a lot of people may have avoided, precisely because of what happened to Danielle and I the previous year. But I don't think it changed how people approach the subject. The timing helped. There was Laura Bates' Everyday Sexism project, Caitlin Moran's book How To Be A Woman had come out. And there was a lot in the news. David Cameron was really behind this anti-FGM campaign. So I think 2012, 2013, was just the right time for a show like that.

Was it emboldening, being able to do routines about say, female genital mutilation, in terms of convincing you that you could make anything funny?

There's no point at which I think I've managed to achieve something and there's not loads more work to do. I'm always striving for better. I don't really want to feel like the struggle's over. You have to approach everything with a clean slate, as if it's the first thing you've done. 

I always think that stand-up is so brilliant for this. Because an audience don't care who you are or what you care about outside of that moment. That's why stand-up is my first love and I'll never, ever, not do it. Because I'm addicted. There's no bullshit with it. You can't cheat. They don't care what you've done before. They only care about what they're listening to right now. 

Do you enjoy having parallel careers, writing for yourself and characters?

Yeah, I mean, how lucky am I? I love them equally and they're both so utterly different, completely different disciplines entirely. I just feel like I'm in a really privileged position to do both.

And I do love the fact that I've always just kept gigging. I really enjoy it in a way that a lot of stand-ups maybe don't. I really look forward to being in a room with people. But I also love writing the characters.

Laura Checkley joins this series as Eel Sister Theresa, communing with birds. Is it a tricky balance conveying the Foresters as eccentric without turning them into rural caricatures?

The first thing is, I cannot express enough in words how much I love the Forest of Dean. This show is a love letter to the forest and those characters. They don't seem eccentric to me at all. I talk to birds. Don't you? 

So I don't see them as gross caricatures at all. I mean, it's an eccentric part of the country but in a really good way. They'll say: 'We're not English, we're not Welsh. We're Foresters'. And you know, they really are quite different. Some of [the characters] are larger than life but you do get people like that and not just in rural communities.

It is a comedy but I never saw the show as mocking them or taking the piss. I think it's actually quite a good representation of the place and people. And they've told me that they really love it, which is pleasing, because I'm planning on moving there at some point. I was actually told about a community living there that doesn't have a TV but everyone told them that they had to get one to watch it. So they did.

What other responses have you had? Apparently there's been a run on domestic chore ledgers ...

Oh, I mean, it's going to be the Icelandic Women's Strike [of 1975] all over again! Generally, there's been a really wonderful reaction, with people really responding to the Eel Queen Festival, Linda's headdress, the ledgers and just that sense of feeling seen. 

Jim Howick's character The Verderer is in a much darker place this series. You allude to the likes of Andrew Tate and Donald Trump in his descent but you don't specifically mention them. Why is that?

I wanted to talk about them but I didn't want their names in there. People who've seen it have told me that they like the Andrew Tate bit, the Laurence Fox bit. Everyone knows who I'm describing. But with The Verderer, that's all seeded from the first series, we're just seeing it play out a little more. 

I do think this is a crisis moment for men's mental health. Gareth Southgate has just done his Dimbleby Lecture [about role models for young men]. And obviously, Adolescence, on Netflix has sparked a lot of reaction. I just wanted to explore that. But The Verderer is a complex character.

And Tony is a different type of man again. Why did you want Paul Whitehouse to play him?

Why wouldn't I have Paul Whitehouse?

The amazing Paul Whitehouse, yes ...

Because I talk to these guys all the time, right? And they're lovely guys, harmless. But they just don't think about what they're saying. They've heard a soundbite on the radio and think, 'Oh, I'll repeat that'. But you boil it down forensically, ask them why would that be, they can't answer. 

There's a lot of joy in pretending to people that you don't understand where they're coming from, in order to make them properly explain why they've said the thing that they've said. So that's what Linda does.

We really enjoy doing those scenes, Paul and I. They're like sketches, a quick, economic way of getting at issues. I very deliberately didn't give Tony any driving of the plot, his scenes are standalone moments. When we go into the pub and he's there, you wonder what's he going to come out with now? What'll it be this time?

His bafflement at a woman winning a stand-up competition ...

A lot of the crew and some of the supporting artists in the background for that scene, they came up afterwards and were like, 'I've had this conversation so many times'. About women not needing to be funny. A lot of the time said by women.

Does it feel like the comedy industry might be about to have a #MeToo reckoning?

I don't know. Obviously, there was the Russell Brand thing. But that didn't seem like a comprehensive investigation, it felt like it was half-done, not as thorough as it might have been. So I don't know the answer. Maybe I'm not mixing in the right circles. I mean, I never go out or see anybody, so I'm not aware of developments in that area at all. I'm certainly not being told about anything that's coming up or who the people might be. I suppose the closest thing we had was Louis CK. But even then, you know …

He's touring internationally again ...

So yeah, it just feels like someone's exposed and then it reverts back to how it was. Harvey Weinstein was massive. But I suppose in comedy, it would depend on how high-profile the people were, how many instances there were and how much media attention it got? Do I feel like there's a big #MeToo in comedy coming? Doesn't feel like it. But I'm not in any WhatsApp groups.

You've co-directed this second series of The Change with Mackenzie Crook. What was that like?

Mackenzie wrote, directed and starred in Detectorists, which I love so much, it was a real influence on The Change in terms of the pace and tone. They're both about the English countryside, with folk music. If I may say, there's a crossover, they're possibly in the same genre, ilk.

We had a lovely meeting, he came on board and it was just this fantastically collaborative experience. He loved working with the actors and it worked really well. He and I both really wanted to allow room to show nature and for people to work the story out for themselves. For it to not be this hectic thing, for it to be really enjoyable and nourishing to watch. And we don't often see the country like that. It was written like that very deliberately.

Was this your first time directing?

Yeah and it's something I'd love to do more of I think. When you've created, written and executive produced something it's easier because everything's in your head.

You've been working on The Change for the better part of a decade now, with the menopause storyline a relatively late addition. Has it worked out pretty much as you envisioned it?

It's interesting because I'll often have visions. I'll see shots and scenes before I've written them. And then I'll work backwards from there. We've managed to get the things that were in my head on screen, which I understand and appreciate does not always happen. I look at it and think that is exactly what was in my head. We're really lucky with the location though, it's such a beautiful place to film that the trees are doing half of it for you. 

But also the crew was out of this world. Mackenzie, Ben Moulden, my director of photography. There's a scene where Linda thinks she can hear the vibrations of the mushrooms and she's sort of half-remembering something that happened to her when she was a kid, the sun's coming through the trees as she's walking, we got on screen exactly what was in my brain. So that was amazing.

The menopause I've been asked about a lot. I won the Comedy Award in 2013 and I'm 54 this year. And this is my first TV commission. How do I feel about how long that's taken? You know, great. If I'd gotten the commission before, maybe it would have been too early? Because I think the menopause should be legitimately talked about in this way. There just aren't any other programmes that put it front and centre like this.

Lockdown was also a really big influence. I always wanted it to look like the shows that I really loved, like Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks, a mountain setting, little town, that kind of 80s, 90s look. They used different film back then and I wanted to make it look like it wasn't now. It's not a period piece. But I wanted it to have that nostalgic feel. When I watch The Change, that's how I remember it looking. It's like a memory or a dream of me being there from the 70s. 

Have you started developing your next stand-up show? I read that you were thinking of making it about the environment ...

It's changed now because of the Trump-Zelensky meeting. I've been deliberately avoiding politics for a couple of years because it was just making me really angry, frightened and upset. But that incident has just absolutely done my head in and I feel absolutely compelled to talk about what's happening in the world at the moment. The environment will naturally be part of that and I've just started putting a load of work-in-progresses on. 

In the same way that Brexit called to me when I was originally going to do a show about death [2016's Because You Demanded It], politics is what I'm being pulled towards. I feel it would be weird for me to not talk about it right now.

Will you return to your Radio 4 series Mortal?

I'm fascinated by death and our relationship to it. The second series of The Change is a lot about mortality, the cycle of life and accepting our deaths in order to live a full and satisfying life. I think we can only do that once we realise that time is passing and we don't have a lot of it really. I don't find talking about death in any way dark or frightening.

I was doing a work-in-progress at Nice N' Spiky in Walthamstow the other night and did a lot about death then. As we were saying earlier, there's just nothing that can't be interesting or amusing and death is very relatable. 

And I loved doing that radio series with my producer Carl Cooper, it was a real labour of love. Complicated because I was doing a lot of it from home and it all only came together in the edit. But I would love to do another series like that. It's just finding a moment because it was quite time-consuming. 

But it's definitely a subject I'm returning to. Maybe the next live show will be Trump, Musk and death, they sound like they all go together don't they?

Stand-up Rob Auton appears in The Change as a spiritually-inclined tattooist, inking 'May all your transitions be joyful' on Linda. What does that phrase mean to you?

Yeah, it just encompasses everything really. I think a lot of people really fear change. But I think that's living half a life because you can't control most of the big things really.

And I don't want to sound woo-woo. But I did go through a sort of enlightenment experience during lockdown, when everything just stopped, of becoming really aware of the seasons, the weather, my own mortality. And what bigger change was there, for everybody, than Covid?

But it could mean anything. Changing your job, your relationship, your politics, the way you think about things. Things change all the time. 

This has reminded me that I didn't have a birth plan when I had my two children. Because I thought that if I had a plan and it changed, which often happens with childbirth, that would affect me mentally. So I wanted to be in the moment very much. If you're too rigid it can cause all sorts of issues for you. And of course, the transitioning is also about biological changes, puberty and menopause.

Do you feel blessed to have so many established and acclaimed actors in the cast?

I mean, it's an embarrassment of riches. With most of the parts, I wrote it with those actors in mind. If Jim Howick hadn't played The Verderer, I probably would have had to cut that character. I couldn't really think of anybody else who could have played Tony and I couldn't really think of anybody else for Pig Man [beyond Jerome Flynn]. I'm very, very, very lucky. If I had just one of them, I would be doing quite well. 

Jim Howick usually plays nice or ineffectual guys, so becoming the main antagonist is quite a transition for him isn't it?

It is. But that's why I thought he was so perfect. Because Jim is actually a genius, I don't think there's anything he couldn't do. He's unbelievably funny but he's really got depth too. I genuinely feel sorry for The Verderer and it needed an actor that could make you feel like that. 

I don't hate men like that. I wonder where on Earth does his anger come from? It's like he can't stop to think, like he constantly needs to keep his brain busy and active. There's a scene where he's talking on the radio, except that he's not, he's not switched it on. Because he doesn't feel that he can talk to anybody about what's bothering him. Like many men, he doesn't feel that he can show vulnerability or weakness. That's why men are in crisis. And Jim played it beautifully.

In this show about relationships forming, there's no sex, until Siobhan, Linda’s sister as played by Liza Tarbuck, goes on perhaps the biggest journey of any of the characters. Would that be fair to say?

She goes on a massive journey. And you know, your heart goes out to her. [Her husband] Martin was obviously a bit of a shit, she didn't have kids because he didn't want to and now she's looking after his mother. But she's thought about Linda's ledger and she's made a physical and mental leap.

She still doesn't have any sympathy for Linda. She felt like she had to step into this mother role when their mum died and she resents Linda for that. 

Mackenzie has said there's a thirst for making more episodes. Do you have further storylines in mind?

Oh, I'm only just getting started. She's found another family now. And we've not got into many of the characters' backstories, there's a hell of a lot still to be revealed that's been seeded from the beginning. You never know if you're going to get a second or third series of anything. But a lot's been planned out, you have to write assuming you will.

There are plenty of issues packed in there already.

Yes, there are loads. There's the environmental stuff, the division of household labour, the menopause, men's mental health, the care system, there's all sorts of stuff to be drilled into. 

With a first series, you're setting everything up, establishing your characters. But we don't know why the Eel Sisters or The Verderer are like that yet. All this has been written, you just haven't seen it yet. I know everybody's backstories because you have to, to know why they are why they are. 

So hopefully, fingers crossed, we get more. This series is almost like a film that's been chopped up into six bits. But there's plenty to come, yeah.

As well as developing your next stand-up show, what else are you working on?

Oh, you know, lots of fingers, lots of pies. I can't go into any detail but there are a few things in development.

• The Change returns with two episodes on Channel 4 tonight , beginning at 10pm.