Riot Women is a thrilling ode to midlife female rage

The other call is from her friend, publican Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne), who asks: “Do you want to join a rock band?” It’s for a local talent contest for charity. Before long, Riot Women are assembled – the Josie and the Pussycats of HRT. The band include Beth, Jess, retiring police officer Holly (Tamsin Greig) and her buzzkill sister, Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore).

The singer is Kitty (Rosalie Craig), daughter of a notorious crime boss – “the top echelon of scum”. Holly previously arrested Kitty in a vividly violent scene reminiscent of Happy Valley. While Kitty sings beautifully – Craig is astonishing, the Joan Jett of Calder Valley – she’s a lairy mess with a harrowing backstory. But all the Riot Women are angry. Their lives have morphed into a menopausal bingo card; ailing parents, horrible males (“Men are wired wrong, aren’t they?”), churlish kids, ageism, sexism, irrelevance. Beth says: “We sing songs about being middle-aged and menopausal and more or less invisible. And you thought the Clash were angry.”

Riot Women’s own songs are realistically basic – “I’m seeing red, red, red” – but, elsewhere, the show’s musical palette is left-field, including Hole, Garbage, the Last Dinner Party and Liz Phair. Wisely, the band storyline isn’t overdone, leaving abundant space for the exploration of knotty personal bonds.

The idea of unlikely female rock stars isn’t new: in 2021, for instance, the comedy series We Are Lady Parts depicted a young Muslim punk band. As the six episodes of Riot Women go by, lectures on the menopause and terrible men grind on too much. Nevertheless, the show is wonderful: witty, character-driven, with added tension. Scanlan and Craig are especially affecting in their portrayal of a flowering friendship and unexpected connection.

The American writer-performer Tim Robinson, formerly of Saturday Night Live, is best known for I Think You Should Leave, the cult rapid-fire sketch show about everyday irritants that goes beyond the comedy of the socially awkward into the outer atmosphere of excruciating.

Robinson brings the same disconcerting, Marmite-esque energy to his new eight-part comedy The Chair Company (Sky Comedy/Now), written with longtime collaborator Zach Kanin. Robinson’s character, Ron, is a family man and an executive at a company that builds shopping malls. He’s leading an important presentation when his chair collapses beneath him. Humiliated, obsessed, he embarks on a life-wrecking mission to find the chair company.

What emerges is a conspiracy comedy pushed to hyper-absurdist limits. How much you enjoy it will depend on your view of Robinson’s polarising comic technique. Ron is the opposite of likable; petty, thin-skinned, rude, maudlin and infantile – as permanently inappropriate as Larry David and as twitchy as Mr Bean. Ron picks fights with restaurant staff and wails in bed: “I have the worst pillow in town.” You have to suspend disbelief that anyone would hire Ron, never mind marry and have kids with him.

The Chair Company is frenetic, hopping between genres – thriller, mystery, horror. The convoluted tedium of the mystery – who is doctoring the chairs and why? – seems a key comic element, as do the nightmarish supporting characters, including an erotica-obsessed henchman (Joseph Tudisco), a passive-aggressive co-worker who blows bubbles and a man with a never-explained dent in his head. It won’t be for everyone but, at its best, the series feels like a deranged lost script for Severance: a surrealist evisceration of corporate America.

On Apple TV+, Mr Scorsese is a five-part docuseries profiling the US film director Martin Scorsese. Directed by Rebecca Miller, it examines the 82-year-old’s astounding oeuvre: Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, After Hours, Goodfellas and many more. Along with extensive interviews with the typically voluble Scorsese, it’s rammed with high-calibre interviewees, including Robert De Niro, Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Spike Lee, Jodie Foster and Daniel Day-Lewis (the latter being Miller’s husband, who starred in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York).

The first half of the series is powerful. There’s a striking sense of the asthma-afflicted Italian-American kid who found he could breathe in air conditioned cinemas; of his neighbourhood, full of mafia wiseguys; and of his feelings about being a Hollywood outsider (he eventually won an Oscar with his 2006 film The Departed).

But, disappointingly for this Scorsese fan, it tapers off into a sterile, hagiographic plod through his movies. The director’s personal life features – including ex-wife Isabella Rossellini – but at a polite distance. The more famous interviewees heap on the kind of mundane saccharine praise you could get from a press junket. Give me more! Towards the end, Scorsese takes a gulp of his asthma inhaler. It feels like the most personal moment in some time.

The Iris Affair

(Sky Atlantic/Sky Showcase/Now)

A thriller about espionage and code-cracking that takes the scenic route around Italy. The opener is complicated to the point of confusing, but it’s elevated by stars Tom Hollander and Niamh Algar.

Storyville: Mr Nobody Against Putin

(BBC Four)

A chance to see David Borenstein’s acclaimed and startling docufilm about an ordinary schoolteacher who decided to document events in Russia and ended up being branded a dissident.

Murdaugh: Death in the Family

(Disney+)

True-crime drama about murders in a South Carolina family. Murky and intense, it stars Patricia Arquette and Jason Clarke.

Photographs by BBC/Drama Republic/Helen Williams