Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I reviewed the Outrageous, a series on BritBox about the Mitford sisters. Heather enjoyed Finding My Way by Malala Yousafzai, about her years growing into adulthood at Oxford when she was already famous and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Jane brought us two books exploring the history of Scotland in two very different ways: Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other by Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish and The Redemption of Alexander Seaton  by Shona MacLean.

Riot Women is the punk band name for a group of menopausal women in Hebden Bridge. They all have various struggles. Music proves to be a creative and emotional outlet, improving the mental health and wellbeing of each participant.

It’s definitely an ensemble cast, but a few characters take over more of the story.

Lorraine  Ashbourne by Christopher William Adach, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Jess is the owner of the local pub who loves serving the people who surround her, including family, but would like a little respect from them, too. Jess is played by Lorraine Ashbourne who I recognized as Mrs. Varley from Bridgerton.

Beth’s husband left her. Her son only occasionally returns her phone calls. The experience she brings to her job as a teacher is unappreciated. She feels invisible until flashy make-up and real keyboard skills garner some attention.

We meet Holly on her last day on the job as a soon-to-be-retired police officer.

Kitty takes the longest emotional journey in the series. We get a glimpse of her in the first episode when we first hear her amazing singing voice. In the second episode, we learn that she is newly homeless and has a complicated past..

I loved seeing the drone shots of Hebden Bridge. What a beautiful village in West Yorkshire! The town developed around weaving mills in the 19th and 20th centuries. I never managed to watch more than an episode or two of Happy Valley, but if you saw that show, you have seen Hebden Bridge before. Here’s a photo of the landscape from Wikipedia:

By Ambrose113 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

We really enjoyed the music even though we don’t think of ourselves as punk fans, being just a bit too old before that scene reached the Midwest. It helped that we had the captions turned on to give us more access to the lyrics.

This series has a lot of humor but also enough trauma, including violence, that it carries a trigger warning and for good reason. The good will, resilient friendships, and creative work made this series feel healing to me so give it a chance as long as you’re in a safe space, at the moment.

My husband liked this, too. Many of the issues around aging are just as relevant to men as women. The men in the series are backdrops for the women’s character arcs, but they represent a good variety of experiences and attitudes.

We streamed Riot Women on BritBox. The content is probably a bit too dependent on foul language to ever run on PBS. I hope they’ll put our DVD for our libraries to purchase soon.