Last week a bold care home in Dorset invited a troupe of pole dancers to perform for its elderly residents. What a thrilling breakthrough, in a number of ways. First, it makes a change from the usual fairly dreary entertainments, and second, the residents chose it themselves, from a list of options. Fancy that! For once they were given a choice, asked their opinion, listened to, and got what they wanted. They fancied “more modern activities”.
They were perhaps sick and tired of bingo, singalongs, banging tambourines, crosswords, telly, chair-yoga, arts and crafts, mindfulness and reminiscences. Not that I want to criticise these pastimes – they’re all lovely, if that’s what you like – but pole dancing makes a refreshing change.
Only last week, while visiting my solicitor to organise power of attorney in case I am suddenly incapacitated or lose my marbles, I told him that I’d rather hurl myself from my perch and drop dead than live in a care home.
“We all feel like that,” said he, “but I think you’ll find, when the time comes, you won’t care so much.” Could be, but in the meantime I have to cope with the dread. I imagine myself, corpse-like, stuck in a brown armchair, pre-cooked slop food, telly burbling on, no dogs allowed. My fears are probably exaggerated, but this pole dancing story has made me feel a tiny bit less desperate. Perhaps this is the new zeitgeist – less bossing about of old people, more acceptance that we still have minds and can make them up for ourselves. Marvellous.
Of course the pole dancing afternoon had its po-faced critics. “In my view it’s inappropriate for a care home. It’s not really the sort of entertainment I’d have thought that residents wanted,” said local councillor Peter Hall. Why inappropriate? It looked more like gymnastics than rudeness to me.
The costumes were not at all saucy, just your average gym clothes – leotards, shorts, crop-tops. What are they meant to wear? Crinolines? And the pole dancers were various shapes, sizes and ages. A realistic assortment, no Hugh Hefner-type mandatory bunny-shape. They looked perfectly respectable to me, like acrobats, twizzling themselves into remarkably clever positions. I couldn’t hang straight out sideways or upside-down from a pole, or twirl myself into knots. It must be thrilling to watch people doing so.
But so what if they had looked sexy, or some of the mixed audience of men and women thought they did? May one not have any form of sex life, or even thoughts, after 65? Perhaps the care home’s critics feel slightly sickened at the thought of any link between older people and sex. But on this occasion they needn’t have worried. The residents may as well have been watching football, because pole dancing is now provisionally recognised as a sport. One day there may be pole dancing at the Olympics. That’s what the International Pole Sports Federation is aiming at.
So the residents were watching a highly skilled sporting activity, to background music of mainly Abba, which they perhaps preferred to Vera Lynn, because remember, many of the current elderly population were brought up in the time of rock‘n‘roll, not the second world war. We may prefer the opera. Whatever turns us on.
Sadly, this hasn’t sunk in with many of the people that “care” for us in old age. We’re not all the same age, or the same class, we don’t have the same tastes, and we’re not all thick. We still have our own minds and like to make them up. So if some of us fancy watching pole dancing, then we don’t need any condescending stuff-shirts telling us we shouldn’t. So thank you, local Dorset pole dancers, and I’m so pleased that you’ve been invited back to perform again.
• Michele Hanson is an author and Guardian columnist
