Mariella Frostrup finds the menopause is fertile ground for Fringe comedy

Having five leeches attached to your vulva (to extract the toxic blood ignorant doctors presumed was trapped inside, hence the lack of periods), being chloroformed to the point of asphyxiation or being burnt at the stake for being grumpy.

Wrong. They all were, at some point in history.

The fact this information is delivered as a joke tells you 63-year-old broadcaster, author, campaigner and menopause advocate Mariella Frostrup and her actor friend Gina Bellman have nailed making light of the menopause in a fun-filled hour that sees them subvert decades of mother-in-law and hot flush jokes at this year’s Fringe.

“People rarely get it right because the array of choices is so appalling,” says Frostrup.

“The thing about menopause is that we have been the butt of male comedians' stand-up jokes since time immemorial and it's really important that we claim that back for ourselves.”


Cracking The Menopause is Frostrup’s Fringe debut, despite many years of making TV programmes and EIBF appearances - and “way out of my comfort zone”, she says in the husky voice once voted the sexiest female on TV. Billed as a mixture of fascinating facts, horrible history, outrage and jokes, it also has an audience interaction section she particularly enjoys.

“You want the audience involved because the whole point is to enlarge and escalate the conversation around menopause, and give women a voice. They shouldn't be sitting listening to me deliver a joke-strewn lecture. It's more about laughing at ourselves and the desperate state of affairs until about 10 years ago.

Also a favorite with Frostrup is the horrible history section.

“Because the thing I couldn't understand was why this thing I knew nothing about would be so shrouded in shame and mystery. Then you delve into the history and no wonder women weren't volunteering the information!

“Here's this perfectly normal, natural, phase of our lives that over the centuries has been misdiagnosed and misrepresented by the very sex that wouldn't go through it, to the point where it was an unspeakable part of women's lives and something we didn't want to own up to and therefore couldn't get any information on how to navigate.”

Cracking The Menopause was written with Alice Smellie, health journalist and menopause activist who also wrote the book of the same title with Frostrup, and is co-presented with her friend of 30 years, the actress Gina Bellman who she met on the BBC sitcom Coupling, in which Frostrup had a cameo.

Now 63, Frostrup has a long and varied career as journalist and TV and radio presenter, author, travel writer, The Observer's agony aunt for almost 20 years, film critic, Booker and Orange Prize judge, Loose Women panellist and charity activist.

In 2022 she founded Menopause Mandate with Davina McCall, Penny Lancaster and others to campaign for greater awareness of the impact of the menopause and in 2024 was appointed Government Menopause Employment Ambassador, working with an independent Menopause Advisory Group who help businesses support women working during menopause.

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Born in Oslo to a Scottish artist mother and Norwegian journalist father, she grew up in Ireland, moving to London after the death of her father when she was 15 to work in the music industry before moving into TV and radio, presenting documentaries and book programmes, including the BBC Radio 4 Open Book programme for nearly two decades, and The Book Show on Sky Arts 1.

Frostrup married The Skids’ lead singer Richard Jobson at 18, divorced him on her 21st birthday and later married human rights lawyer Jason McCue, with whom she has two children and lives in Somerset.

In 2018 she presented The Truth About The Menopause documentary on BBC One and has since authored books on the subject - Cracking the Menopause and Menolicious (a menopause-focused cookbook with Mary Berry’s daughter Belles, as well as Collections & Anthologies: Dear Mariella (her agony columns), Wild Women (female explorers’ first-hand accounts) and Desire (literature's sexiest stories).

We’ve had a helping of horrible history, what else can we expect?

“A fascinating fact would be that one in six women leave the workplace because of lack of support during menopause, which costs the UK £1.7 billion a year, and is only now, thankfully, being addressed as the economic disaster it represents. It would be incredibly easy to rectify,

“For a very long time, everything to do with women has been on moral grounds - you know, it's wrong that we don't have equal pay - but what we're realising now because we have so much data, is it's not a moral argument for women's biology to be considered and included in how workplaces operate, it's actually an economic imperative.

“Women make up 48% of the workforce but are trying to exist within a system not invented for us. It was shaped around the working man's needs up until the Second World War which relied on somebody doing all the unpaid labour at home.

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“Even things like flexible hours, if the majority of air stewards are female and tend towards middle age, yet airlines design uniforms that are made of man-made fibres that make you sweat heavily, and people are working 12 hour shifts on long haul flights and being extremely uncomfortable, they're just ill considered and hark back to an era when workplaces weren't built for women.”

“Simple changes would rectify many things that are challenging for women. It just requires recognition that we're operating in alien territory, as it were. There is a huge difference between men and women. And it's one of the biggest separating factors around second wave feminism - our mother's generation - whose argument was we were the same as men and therefore equal and should be treated the same. It's not that the equality argument is misplaced but the idea we're the same as men has done us no favors. Now we’re finally getting to a point where we recognise we all exist on a spectrum and bring different assets to the workplace and daily life.

“We're treated as a minority but make up 52% of the population so what benefits women benefits everybody. It's high time we stop being apologetic for pursuing that goal first and foremost - and do the fine tuning afterwards.”

Frostrup’s argument is that rights for women improve everyone’s lives not just now but in the future.

“There's no question we're going to bring up a better generation of children if both parents are involved. It's why I'm so committed to the idea of parental leave rather than maternity leave, because the minute you stop expecting women to take up the slack in every aspect of domestic life is the moment that the world changes and becomes a place that is better for us all to inhabit.

“Not everyone has children, not everyone wants to have children, but it's that expectation that when push comes to shove, whether it's caring for elderly parents, domestic responsibilities, making sure the fridge is full, way too much of it falls on women's shoulders. But we now make up 48% of the workforce and can't be expected to do all the unpaid labour as well. It’s got to be shared.”

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So we've got the facts, the history, outrage, what about the jokes?

“Menopause is constantly presented as a crisis point in women's lives, but if you have the right information and support, we can laugh at a lot of things that might appear terrifying, and laugh at ourselves.

“One of the funniest passages of the show is where we talk about the ‘manopause’ and bring men in. We acknowledge they're also going through a crisis - perhaps merely a wardrobe crisis, when it suddenly becomes OK to wear patterned socks with your shorts, or a wine shirt on every occasion.

“Let’s face it, who’s suffering most here? There’s a very obvious difference between women's catastrophic jump off a cliff crash in hormones and men's slow descent into an era of retirement and playing golf. Not to minimise what men are going through, but if you address what women are experiencing, everyone will be better off.”

Frostrup and Bellman have performed their show already around England and are pleased the reaction is not just laughter and outrage but positivity.

“We’ve been moved by the galvanising aspects of it. We want everyone to leave absolutely committed to changing the dial for women going through this phase of life and we end by looking at ‘the sunny uplands’.

Which are?

“Well, the other aspect of this stage of life that we don't talk about enough is the incredible liberation it gives us.

“We're one of a very small number of species, whales - and it’s recently been discovered giraffes - that have this second part of life, half to a third of our lifespan, past fertility. Looked at scientifically, it’s because we are considered to be of imperative value post fertility, as much as during yet we've been made to feel this is our redundant phase, where we step out of the limelight, sit back and wait for death to carry us away. Well, that's a very long period of time to be twiddling your thumbs and feeling you don't have a part to play in the world.

“It's important we plan our lives cognisant of this amazing third act where we're no longer expected to give birth, where the accrued experience of our lives delivers us with an incredible sense of confidence, great wisdom, and liberation. That’s the reason the majority of women who end marriages or long term relationships do so in their 50s, the majority of women who start businesses, it’s in their 50s. Women step forward once they're freed of historical societal expectations. So there's a really inspiring way of looking at this period, freed from expectation and allowed to live.”

Now that life is more liberated for Frostrup, with travel always a passion, where would she like to go?

“I've been to Turkey but I'd like to go to the south coast and look at the ruins. I'm about to set off to Norway, food and culture gathering for a programme I’m doing. And I’ve always wanted to go to the Hebrides, and to Orkney especially, because my dad was friends at Edinburgh University with George Mackay Brown and I've read so much of his writing. I think it's a place that marries Celtic and the Norse cultures in a way that doesn't exist anywhere else.”

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Warming to her theme, Frostrup has another fascinating fact.

“The decrease in hormones at menopause, oestrogen in particular, leads to a decrease in empathy. And empathy is something women need to be imbued with, that keeps us chained to domestic responsibility for a large part of our fertile years.

“But you get to this stage and think, ‘I don't care anymore. I am going to do exactly what I want to do.’ It's OK to start doing things for yourself, which women struggle with during the family rearing years, so that's something we can take advantage of.

“There are good things about becoming less visible. You might wonder why builders aren't whistling but that gives you confidence to step further out into the world than you might have when you were younger.

“It's important we don't ever think we've reached saturation point. Just as there isn't a time to stop learning, there isn't a time to stop travelling. There isn't a time to stop wanting to change the world around you.

“Although the world might have told us this was a period when we should disappear,
the opposite is true, and not taking advantage of this is a crime. Gap years are wasted on the young. Why can't we go off on a gap year at 65 and have experiences, especially those of us who didn't have that in our own youth?”

“It's a question of maintaining curiosity and coupling that with a newfound sense of liberation. The world might be your oyster and the opportunity to do things differently is there, the opportunity to change everything is there, until the minute you're dead.”

Does Frostrup think things are improving around menopause awareness, thanks in part to herself and high profile advocates like Davina McCall?

“Obviously I'm grateful for any gratitude, but it's a shame it's relegated to a couple of celebrities like Davina and me. I'd like to mention Kirsty Wark who did an amazing documentary for the BBC about menopause, and has talked about it a lot, and Carolyn Harris, the Labour MP who kickstarted the single prescription charge campaign. There’s also the amazing array of organisations working together, so many women, and increasing numbers of men, working for the same goals. All Davina and I did was enlarge the platform and thereby women felt more comfortable talking about it.”

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“The show is an opportunity for women to come together to have a shared experience and come out feeling maybe a degree of strength and knowledge that will make the passage a lot easier for our daughters.”

“I really hope lots of men come along,” she says. “I’ve been delighted to see about 8%-10% of the audience being male, supporting their partners, and they've been really positive about information gleaned. I did a talk at Anthropy [a national gathering at the Eden Project of leaders from business, government, academia, and civil society] and the book signing queue was 30% men, for wives, mothers, daughters, colleagues. It was one of those moments where you feel you’ve managed to shift the dial a bit.

“It’s fantastic men are on board and it's no longer something we carry around as a guilty secret, but something you can be open and explicit about in your workplace and family. ”

“The cookery book was written with the same objective - normalising something entirely normal that has been buried under shame and embarrassment.”

Frostrup is evangelical that there is still work to be done.

“Women are desperately reaching out because they're not getting the support they should be getting from their doctors. In the UK until two years ago it wasn't mandatory that general practitioners studied menopause at all so you would be sitting with a doctor who most likely had never studied the topic and was dismissing your symptoms without any training. It's mad. Now it's mandatory, but the full impact won't be felt for another 10 years.

Beyond the Fringe and the menopause, Frostrup only sees her own horizons widening.

Her three part series, the Writing Life of Sylvia Plath is airing on Radio 4 and she is relaunching her Books To Live By podcast.

“It’s a sort of Desert Island Discs for books, returning in the autumn,” she says, listing recommendations including Sylvia Plath’s writing, Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, David Grossman’s The Thinking Heart, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow and Alaa-Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building.

“I’m trying to do different things. Being on the British Council board and a V&A trustee has been fascinating and expanded my knowledge. It's a completely different skill set. I feel like I’m moving further away from celebrity and into tangible, interesting work.”

Does she feel that celebrity and the ‘Mick Jagger's pal’ reputation meant she was taken less seriously in the past?

“I think culturally it's been difficult for women to diversify. People are too keen to pigeonhole you as ‘the party one’ or ‘the book one’, but most of us have experience and interests in lots of different things. But tropes and stereotypes are slowly dissipating.

“I'm glad that the world's changing.”

Fringe show, Mariella Frostrup: Cracking the Menopause, 10 - 17 August, 2.30pm, Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh, gildedballoon.co.uk