‘Dad's way of coping with two motherless daughters was to buy us tickets to feminist lectures, start fucking our godmother and eventually stop calling,’ Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character Fleabag says to camera in the first season of Fleabag. Now we’re in the throes of the second series, it's become outrageously apparent that Phoebe’s imbued the better parts of those feminist talks into her writing. After all, she did tell one magazine earlier this year she's a fan of The Guilty Feminist podcast.
Alongside the will-they-won’t-they relationship with the priest offering some sexual tension and the slow thawing out of a friendship with her sister giving us some emotional tug, the wise monologue is now a fundamental part of the second series, anchoring the episodes to universal feelings beyond those of the middle-class white woman with a guinea-pig café and no mates.
The delivery might not be entirely natural - not many people could think up such incredible theses, let alone deliver them word-perfect on the first go - but the content is totally relatable. Here are some we've enjoyed so far, if 'enjoy' is the best word for 'made us feel so seen we had to check the nearest window to make sure no-one was actually there, spying on us'.
Fleabag 2's best speeches
1 of 3Fleabag talking to Belinda
'Women are born with pain built in. It's our physical destiny,' says hot businesswoman Belinda, played by Scott Thomas, detailing all the ways women experience agony: 'Period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives.'Meanwhile…'Men don't. They have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we also do very well on our own. And then they create wars, so they can feel things and touch each other, and when there aren't any wars they can play rugby.''And we have it all going on in here, inside. We have pain on a cycle for years and years and years and then, just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes. The fucking menopause comes and it is the most most wonderful fucking thing in the world! And, yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get fucking hot and no-one cares, but then you're free. No longer a slave, no longer a machine, with parts. You're just a person in business.'What's so great about the speech? Dissecting it might be like dissecting a joke, so let us leave it at this: it's incredibly true, isn't it?
2 of 3Fleabag at confession
Though the sexy priest's 'Kneel' line got viewers' collective knees all a-quiver, what prompted it was Fleabag producing a tearful tirade in the confession booth about what she wants: 'I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, and who to love, and how to tell them.''I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I've been getting it wrong. And I know that's why people want people like you in their lives. Because you just tell them how to do it. You just tell them what to do, and what they'll get out of the end of it.''Even though I don't believe your bullshit, and I know that scientifically nothing I do makes any difference in the end anyway, I'm still scared! Why am I still scared?! So just tell me what to do. Just fucking tell me what to do, Father!''Even though I don't believe your bullshit, and I know that scientifically nothing I do makes any difference in the end anyway, I'm still scared! Why am I still scared?! So just tell me what to do. Just fucking tell me what to do, Father!'It's one of the few times we've seen Fleabag properly bawl, and maybe it's not the ensuing kissing that leads to god apparently smiting the church by breaking a picture on its frame, but this monologue causing him to show he exists. Regardless, needing someone to make all our decisions for us, to take control of our lives, to defer to, especially when our parents are absent or dead, or retreating somehow from the parental duties they used to just do for us, is entirely relatable for anyone having to run their own adult life. Though we get the feeling that Phoebe is far too productive to spend her time online, she's not totally removed from the modern world, and this speech speaks to a particular era so many adults are living through, where we're exposed, daily, to more options and information and opportunities than ever, to the point we don't know where to begin. We're paralysed by possibility and the worry that admitting we want to abdicate our responsibility is, somehow, an affront to the privileges we've been afforded by feminism. And Phoebe conveys it all so well in this one speech, opening up to another person on screen in a particularly raw way.
3 of 3Fleabag talking about hair
After Claire gets a dreadful asymmetrical bob haircut, Fleabag drags her older sister off to the salon where it was done to have a go at hairdresser Anthony. When he says 'Don't blame me for your bad choices, hair isn't everything''Hair is everything. We wish it wasn't so we could actually think about something else occasionally, but it is. It's a difference between a good day and a bad day, we're to think it's a symbol of power, of fertility. Some people are exploited for it and it pays your fucking bills. Hair is everything, Anthony.'When his assistant brings him the reference, and it shows that the haircut Claire has is exactly the one she asked for, he responds 'if you want to change your life, change your life. It's not gonna happen in here.'A masterclass in the ways in which projection works, so that our darkest problems and issues, the ones we're too afraid to address so suppress them deep within, sometimes pop up in seemingly unrelated interactions, this snippet of a speech is also a lesson in checking our facts before getting righteously indignant about anything.