What an endlessly and exquisitely cruel world it is. You could not be blamed for turning away from all its painful horrors and pretending they do not exist until it is your turn for a visit from the malevolent fates. For those a little more courageous, or whose coping strategies include mental preparation for as many vicissitudes as possible, there are people such as the Roberts family, and the films they allow to be made, to remind us.
Last night gave us Living with Dementia: Chris’s Story (BBC1, 8pm), which charted 18 months of the experiences of 55-year-old Chris Roberts and his family, using video diaries, interviews and footage recorded by seven cameras positioned around the house. Chris was diagnosed with vascular dementia and early-onset Alzheimer’s five years ago after he became uncharacteristically impatient and volatile.
When filming began, Chris – previously a successful businessman and motorbike enthusiast – had already had to give up driving. Peeling potatoes defeated him. He wandered around the house at night, not sure where he was or how to get back to wherever it was he had been. The family installed alarms and hung curtains over the doors to stop him going out. The knowledge that you can pull back a curtain to find something beyond had already slipped out of his increasingly porous mind.
You could see how much his wife Jayne adored him, and how much he, when he was there, adored her. But, as the disease encroached on all that made Chris Chris – “the remnant of me is becoming less and less” – life became inestimably, inexorably harder. From crying after leaving him for his first day in respite care, Jayne began to welcome the vital relief it offered. More tears followed later, as she tried to resist overnight care, because “I might like him being there and won’t want him back.”
After diagnosis, Jayne and Chris threw themselves into the work – of which this film is presumably part – of raising awareness of the disease. It was, as it could hardly fail to be, a deeply personal and moving account of their experiences. The use of diary and domestic footage kept it intimate without feeling intrusive (I’m assuming that Chris and/or Jayne gave permission for the shots of him walking around at night, disorientated, in his boxer shorts) which is surely the best way of capturing people’s attention and accessibly explaining whatever subject is under scrutiny.
Beyond that, there’s a larger question of how much help these films, so intensely personal, but devoid of the political, provide. What happens, you wonder, to people less well-placed – less loving, less wealthy, less socially capitalised – than the Roberts family? Those who have less help, less willingly given by family? Do they get the in-house or respite care that they need? What of those whose dementia makes them violent rather than withdrawn or frustrated?
In some ways, these are the wrong questions to be asking here (and certainly, they are the wrong questions to be asking the Roberts family – they are always the wrong questions to be asking people in the middle of suffering – and I am not doing so) but I do sometimes long for companion pieces to such films. What money and help is available. Is it enough? What should we be agitating for? What should we be demanding of our governments as the population ages?
The Roberts leave us to wrestle with some important, non-political questions that only we can answer – will we find their courage if and when our time comes? Will we find their grace? I think I know what my answer is, but maybe, with their example before me and a bit more mental preparation, I can improve upon it before the fates swoop down.
The second of Neil Gaiman’s Likely Stories (Sky Arts, 9pm) last night comprised two more tales – Closing Time, with Johnny Vegas as the spinner of a yarn that might have been spooky if it had not been repeatedly undercut by the scepticism of his listeners in the pub (presumably an effort to pre-empt and negate viewers’ own disbelief that misfired), and Looking for the Girl, with Kenneth Cranham, whose truly brilliant performance could not save it from being too slight and shallow a story (recurring Penthouse model who never ages symbolises lost youth, the power of female sexuality an’ all that shizz) to be worthy of the time, talent and effort put in. Likely one – two – for diehard Gaiman fans only, I suspect.
