Ten years ago, television changed forever. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s award-winning one-woman Edinburgh Fringe show, Fleabag, might have tip-toed onto BBC Three for its first run in 2016, but soon it became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. There wasn’t a woman in the land who wasn’t told – with almost foaming-mouthed fervour – to watch it. On its 10th anniversary, the two series comedy is regarded as one of the best British TV shows in history.
The messy, unlikeable woman had never been quite so, well, likeable until Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote and played her as a sex-mad, quip-making millennial who was secretly using those exact traits to distract herself from a life-changing trauma. She did the things we couldn’t: she was mean about her dates, she fancied the priest, she masturbated to Obama next to her sleeping boyfriend, she stole from her evil stepmother and told us all about it in secretive to-camera one liners. She was a reflection of our deepest darkest fears and desires, packaged in one gangly, beautiful, chaotic woman.
Consequently, the real woman behind Fleabag was held up as a prophet of women’s inner lives. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, it seemed, really knew us and – most importantly – wasn’t afraid to put it on screen. While her earlier series, Crashing, was also brilliant, it didn’t quite touch the zeitgeist. Fleabag, meanwhile, was at the forefront of fourth-wave feminism, when we were convinced that Hillary Clinton could be President of the US and girl bosses made millions. The timing was perfect – but so was the show.
