Bridget Christie: Sweater Potato Review – How Menopause Frees Up the Attitude | comedy

IInner peace and contentment aren’t always gifts for a comedian, and who knows? – Maybe that’s why Bridget Christie’s latest show was a little less exciting than its predecessors. Christie had found her happy place: calmly single, professionally triumphant (on TV, too, after years of not finding a niche there), and menopausal relieved her of the need to look at almost anything. There’s comedy in freedom from care, and Christie makes abundant use of it in an entertaining 90-minute special – like her Channel 4 show Change – about what life is like for women (or at least this woman) when estrogen gets out of the way.

But “Sweater Potato Pizza” feels like a placeholder for the show, lacking the zaniness or clownish fury of her best work. Its short first half begins with contradictory quotes from Presidents Obama and Trump – but this gives a misleading impression of what the future holds. Even more telling is the routine that follows, in which Christie re-enacts a story as told by her post-menopausal boyfriend, a hackneyed tale about a night out that turns into a symphony of digressions, misbehavior (he mixes Benjamin Zephaniah with Netanyahu, memorably) and evocative vocabulary out of hand. It’s as much a sketch as a stand-up, and our host brings it to life with characteristic dread.

This is the life of a 50-year-old woman, Christie says: recording farts for her friends on WhatsApp; Reporting the most unusual physical malfunctions to her doctor; Socially invisible and perfectly happy with that. There are two storylines early in the show that contrast a young Christie eager to please her counterpart later in life – one indulging in an unlikely sexual fetish on a date, the other not caring much when her gardener catches her eating cake straight from the box.

You can’t not enjoy these things: Christie’s stylistic joy is contagious, and her taste is sound in the construction, one routine after another, little carnivals of its absurdity. But there’s also a sense that she’s in her comfort zone with the material — and that one or two routines aren’t up to par. The number in Alan Carr and the Traitors is too inflated to justify the huge chunk of ICE killings in Minnesota. The joke about Jimmy Savile and the addition of new lines to it seems a bit arbitrary and ungrounded.

There’s also peachy material, like a routine (which she’d like us to understand — frankly, not based on her family life) about the thermonuclear hatred of 15-year-old girls. But I found myself wishing for more of the political edge that motivates a later section, in which Christie tackles the “teenage” TV drama. The excitement and opinion both passionate and provocative, which ventured into its trademark 10-ton cynicism, is palpable.

And while the show concludes with matter-of-fact words about the state of the world, politics are rarely integrated into the comedy here. We’re left with another scintillating performance from Christie, if not – as is often the case with these comedies – a substantive one.