Distinguished but disillusioned, TV producer Judith Holder decided to stop work at 60. Now, she co-hosts a hit show with the comedian Jenny Eclair and has sold out a West End theatre
In her late 50s, Judith Holder, a television producer, found that none of her ideas were accepted. Twice nominated for a Bafta, she had executive-produced the comedy series Grumpy Old Women, recorded the voiceover and written the spin-off books. Now the message was: “We’re not going to commission anything for the older woman, Judith, because they are watching anyway.”
Clearly, this rankled, because Holder, 67, retired – then re-emerged as a co-presenter of the podcast Older & Wider, with the comedian Jenny Eclair. “The older women we had attracted with Grumpy needed some sort of gang show of their own,” she says. They are more than 200 episodes in, with 5.5m downloads. Last month, Holder made her stage debut in Older & Wider Live. The dates at the Leicester Square theatre in London sold out within 48 hours. It’s “a massive V-sign to a world that assumes that a woman like me is not worth a second glance”, she says.
