Trent Loom reviews Riot Women, the latest offering from Sally Wainwright of Happy Valley fame

Having never viewed Happy Valley that info means nada to me, so I’m going to contextualise Riot Women within the wider malaise of the screen ents punk genre instead.

Riot Women is clearly influenced by Nida Manzoor’s brilliant two season Channel 4 sitcom We Are Lady Parts (2021-2024), which itself was derivative of Eyad Zehra’s 2010 movie adaptation of The Taqwacores, which was based on Michael Muhammad Knight’s 2004 novel of the same name.

The Taqwacores depicted an imaginary American Muslim punk scene, which in due course would inspire an actual musical genre of Islamic punk rock now known as Taqwacore, championed by the likes of US band The Kominas.

We Are Lady Parts concerned itself with an all-female fictitious British Muslim punk band, who were struggling to conquer the music industry irrespective of their oppressed status in society due to patriarchy, poverty and, to a lesser extent, societal Islamophobia.

Wainwright essentially extrapolates aspects of both The Taqwacores and Lady Parts by repackaging them for a primarily white middle-class audience with corresponding female middle-aged protagonists, whose life-course experiences are shaped accordingly by perimenopausal symptoms, drink/drug abuse, domestic violence, empty-nest syndrome, fluctuating mental health, caring for elderly relatives, and a collective existential experience of feeling relatively invisible in contemporary British society. The characters featured in the series form a punk rock band as a reaction against negativity in their individual lives, in an attempt to regain their cognitive well-being.

Wainwright’s depiction of punk is far more that of a neoliberal musical and fashion commodity than it is of an anarchic sub or counter-culture. Nonetheless, that premise operates reasonably well as some of the protagonists are of an age at which they would have lived through the late seventies and punk’s brief onslaught against the mainstream music industry, when bands such as The Clash, The Damned and the Sex Pistols stormed up the national charts, when the oldest of the protagonists would have merely been teenagers.

My initial worry with regards to Riot Women was that it might succumb to simply being too ‘BBC Twee’ and to that end I feared that it had the potential to be a total disaster and thus detrimental to the reputation of punk as a subcultural genre overall. Fortunately that is not the case, largely because although it is certainly quite humorous in places, the mainstay of the themes involved which formulate the plot itself are relatively hard hitting. The series does not shy away from social ills such as dysfunctional relationships, criminality, violence or sexual abuse, as examples.

By setting events in West Yorkshire, Wainwright also succeeds in endowing Riot Women with having a quintessentially British feeling, which is further enhanced with the inclusion of two Asian characters with regional accents, in addition to a likeable Trans Female, who is manoeuvred from the periphery of the cast then closer to centre stage, as events unfold as the series progresses.

However, whether Wainwright would have been able to pull off Riot Women in the absence of it starring Rosalie Craig as Kitty in the lead is highly debatable, as it is Craig whose singing voice and acting is excellent throughout (be she sober or depicting Kitty whilst inebriated) and it is also Craig (to my mind at least) who glues the credibility of the entire shebang together as a whole.

Nonetheless, Wainwright ensures that there are plenty of twists and unexpected plot turns along the way, to the extent that I began to doubt that Riot Women would succeed in reaching a finale as a self-contained series. But as the curtains fell on what became a hugely entertaining and highly enjoyable first season we were left with a cliffhanger which could very easily prove to be the basis of a second Season in the future.

By all accounts that I’ve read, Riot Women was a success with critics, viewers and in the ratings to boot, so I’m optimistic we shall witness a sequel in the not too distant future! In fact, punk’s clearly not dead with a menopausal hot flush in Calderdale in 2025, which certainly boasts much better future prospects for its heroes than the ‘No Future For You’ lyric that Johnny Rotten crooned at the top of his lungs, all those years ago, way back in 1977!

Riot Women is available to watch on BBC iPlayer