It’s a question surely everyone has considered: if you had six months to live, what would you do with the time? Film-maker Sue Bourne – whose work has an extraordinary ability to leave the most hardened viewer reaching for the tissues – broaches the subject with sensitivity and a surprising amount of joy in A Time to Live (BBC2). Bourne speaks to 12 people with terminal diagnoses, aged from 23 to 69. We meet mothers, daughters, husbands; thinkers, travellers, jokers.
I lasted just two minutes before choking up, when Fi cheerfully revealed that living with stage four ovarian cancer had changed her completely. The 30-year-old used to care what people thought of her, “and now, I don’t give a fuck”. She got a rescue dog to keep her company when the chemotherapy knocked her for six, adopting one that “nobody else wanted, because he was falling apart”. It’s grim humour, but Bourne sets a wry, defiant tone early on. Fi explains that people getting upset around her is irritating, because it means they’re anticipating her death, rather than experiencing her life. I dried my eyes. Bourne stated it clearly in a voiceover at the start: this is not a film about death and dying, it’s a film about life.
And it is beautiful, touching on all shades of human experience by provoking that most fundamental question: what would you do? Jolene, the youngest subject, carried on working as a distraction, but in her interview, she quietly rages at the injustice of it all. (Bourne interjects from behind the camera. “Breathe deeply”, she counsels kindly, when it all gets too much.) Nigel, who was 69 when he found out his brain tumour would kill him, explains that his friends have all got “sympathy fatigue”, and seems amused that people call every few months, to check that he is still alive. His illness means he can no longer drive; I would watch an entire series of him directing his wife Denise from the passenger seat.
Some people are shockingly, brilliantly practical: wine-loving Kevin, with his project management approach to saying goodbye, and Louise, who sent her youngest son to live with her sister for a while, so he could get used to her being gone. Some embrace knowing that they have a finite amount of time left and grab at their last years with gusto. Annabel, who found out she had terminal bone cancer at 51, not only took up salsa, but ditched her husband and discovered a new love life. Kevin, who always wanted to run a six-day, 251km ultramarathon in the Sahara, just did it, the framed running top on his wall a memento of such a staggering achievement.
So many of the 12 were so stoic and serene, that I started to wonder how honest a picture this really was. Many of them had enough money to see out their last months by doing whatever they wanted to, and seemed at least well enough to carry on with a modicum of normality. Like most people, I have seen terminal cancer in action, and it was brutal and hard and nothing like this. But again, Bourne is there before you. Anita, who found out she had motor neurone disease two weeks before her 70th birthday, sold her husband’s stamp and coin collections and used the proceeds to see the world. She then explains that when the disease progresses too far for her, she won’t have the money for 24-hour care, and nor does she want to move in with her son and lose her independence. She’s going to fly to Switzerland (“Drink a drink, off I go, wonderful”). But she’s devastated that she can’t do it at home.
I braced myself for a final scene in which Bourne reveals who is alive, and to whom this film now stands as a memorial. With a real touch of class, however, she informs us instead that she has decided not to tell. This is a film about life and living, after all.
Elsewhere, in an upbeat night for schedulers, the historian Tom Holland explored Isis: The Origins of Violence (Channel 4), having controversially looked at The Origins of Islam in 2011. Though he vowed never to go back to the topic, here he is again, in Paris, in Sinjar, considering difficult questions such as why Isis feels mass slaughter is justified, and what basis is there for it in religion, via lingering shots of his reaction to atrocities. Holland’s poetic approach isn’t for everyone (“You come to Paris because Isis have a thing about Paris,” he drones), but it’s a dense and detailed look at history and texts that – even at 90 minutes – feels as if it can only scratch the surface.
