Peter Fincham falls under the spell of this wyrd and wonderful new sitcom

Remember Dennis Potter? He was a leading dramatist, perhaps the leading dramatist, from the golden age of TV. He wrote Pennies From Heaven, which starred Bob Hoskins, and The Singing Detective with Michael Gambon.

He also wrote lots of TV plays – that’s what they called them in those days – which are less well-remembered. One example is Brimstone and Treacle, about a couple whose daughter has been severely injured in a hit-and-run accident, and which was later remade into a film starring Sting.

When Potter was dying (of pancreatic cancer, aged 59), he gave a long interview to Melvyn Bragg, who treated him with the sort of reverence that only Sir David Attenborough would command today. Potter called the tumour that was killing him Rupert, after Rupert Murdoch. He chain-smoked throughout.

Would his plays stand up in the modern world? Goodness knows. The later ones often involved surprisingly young women wearing surprisingly few clothes.

Dennis Potter was a towering figure in the world of TV drama, but TV drama doesn’t survive like TV comedy. You can write the history of the sixties and seventies through its great sitcom characters – Alf Garnett, Basil Fawlty. Not so with drama. When you think of The Singing Detective, you mainly think of Michael Gambon’s scaly make-up.

The other thing people remember about Dennis Potter is that, improbably, he came from the Forest of Dean. I think he even set a TV play there, though the “in popular culture” section of the Wikipedia entry for the forest doesn’t mention it. It does however include an interesting pot pourri of Forest of Dean-related facts: Black Sabbath wrote their 1973 album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath at Clearwell Castle; the area had a heroin epidemic in 1988; and in July 2014, scenes from Star Wars: The Force Awakens were filmed in an area called Puzzlewood.

All of this has nothing, and yet weirdly everything, to do with the fact that one of the year’s most unusual and original comedies, The Change (Channel 4), is set in the Forest of Dean. It’s written by and starring the brilliant Bridget Christie and it’s definitely got more laughs than Brimstone and Treacle. (Full disclosure: my production company Expectation produces the series but I can’t personally claim any credit for it.)

The Change is a bit bonkers, frequently very touching and always funny. It’s about Linda, who decides to leave her boorish husband Steve (Omid Djalili) and go on an adventure. She’s just turned 50 and is going through the menopause, but The Change is much more than a menopause comedy. Linda isn’t having a breakdown, she simply wants to do something for herself. She’s not even saying she won’t come back.

So she heads for the forest, where she encounters an array of characters who can be broadly grouped as mad and madder – an eccentric and occasionally scary pair of sisters, Carmel (Monica Dolan) and Agnes (Susan Lynch); a chap called Pig Man (Jerome Flynn), who lives in a cave; Tony, a pensioner who hasn’t really caught up with the 21st century (a scene-stealing turn from Paul Whitehouse); and the oddly named Verderer (Jim Howick), who is bearded and angry and runs the local radio station.

There’s also a great performance from Liza Tarbuck as Linda’s sister Siobhan. Siobhan is having none of this new age nonsense, assumes Linda is an having an affair – she isn’t – and implores her to get back to Steve whose life is falling apart because he can’t find the TV remote.

And there’s one relatively sane and charming character, Joy, played by the brilliant Tanya Moodie.

That’s a remarkable cast to bring together on a C4 comedy budget, and it’s enormously to Bridget Christie’s credit that, although her background is as a stand-up comedian rather than an actor, she’s more than a match for any of them. Linda is a wonderful creation – curious, vulnerable, determined, principled, funny, lovable and sexy. (In her biker’s leathers, she’s like a postmodern version of Girl on a Motorcycle).

There are all sorts of echoes in The Change – of films like Deliverance and The Wicker Man, of Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem. Music infuses the show, and Shirley Collins’ beautiful recording of “Hares on the Mountain” plays over the credits.

All this put me in mind of Rob Young’s book Electric Eden, which traces the history of England’s folk revival and somehow links Benjamin Britten to Fairport Convention.

There’s a timelessness about the world Christie creates, and yet it’s very much set in the here and now. The cinematography is stunning – it looks absolutely gorgeous. I’m not sure it would make you want to go on holiday to the Forest of Dean, but that’s probably how the people who live there want to keep it.

Arguments rage about Channel 4, about whether they should be privatised, about the place they occupy in the streaming world. There was a time when fulfilling their distinctive remit meant commissioning dramas from the likes of Dennis Potter which were self-consciously “important”.

The Change isn’t like that – it’s a comedy, and it’s pleasingly daft. It isn’t angling for a feature on the South Bank Show and I suspect Bridget Christie would demur if asked to be interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. But it’s everything we should cherish Channel 4 for. Long may they, and The Change, continue.

Peter Fincham is co-founder of Expectation TV. Previously he was Managing Director of Talkback, Controller of BBC One and Director of Television at ITV.

Our July/August issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.