Last year, BBC2 aired Sue Bourne’s wonderful and affecting documentary A Time To Live, which followed several people who were living with the knowledge that they would die sooner than they had expected to. It was honest, charming and funny, and maintained a grip long after it was over. I have often thought about its perfect ending, which refused to reveal which of the interviewees was still here, and who had since died, so fixed was its belief that the film was about life. This frankness about death is surprisingly scarce on television, but My Wonderful Life (Sky 1), two years in the making, is another attempt to understand what it means to know that death is just round the corner, though it takes a very different approach.
Ian Edmunds is 56 and has terminal prostate cancer. He is poetic and remarkably reflective about his fate, and grateful for the good people he has met during his life, particularly his wife, Christine, who sits by his side. He says his only regret is that he didn’t meet her sooner, that 22 years together just isn’t quite enough. This is very much a box-of-tissues kind of show. Ian died in 2016, and My Wonderful Life affords him the chance to reach out to the friends and family he has left behind. “It was important to him not to let his death ruin their memory of his life,” says Julie Walters, offering the kind of sanguine comfort in voiceover that only Walters can. She’s the perfect guiding hand here, soothing and matter-of-fact, with just the necessary balance of the two.
A little over a year after Ian’s death, we see what Ian was up to, and what he has left behind. He delivers video messages to his loved ones, his final, carefully chosen words, and a treat to remember him by. So his cousin Gary, a fellow Slade fan, gets to stand on stage with Noddy Holder and yell, “Keep on rockin’ Wolverhampton!” to the imaginary crowd. Ian’s brother is taken on a VIP tour of the Hawthorns stadium, because the two of them ran a West Bromwich Albion fanzine together. Christine is taken back to the site of Ian’s proposal, and serenaded with a choir’s rendition of her favourite song, Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
Most people are said to have imagined their own funeral; in My Wonderful Life, the participants in each of the four episodes are arranging their own memorials. It’s inevitably emotional, and though everyone has obviously given permission to be involved, it can feel a little intrusive to watch the rawness of a family, in particular, watching the person they have recently lost speaking from beyond the grave. It can prove an unsteady mix – Ian’s reassuring people that they were important to him is touching and honest, as is his apology for not being a better brother, but the animation of his faddy collections (pens, watches, beer mats) is a leap into whimsy. Still, death is anything but straightforward. At the end, Christine is presented with a book that Ian wrote, telling his life story. One of his wishes was to get it all down on paper. My Wonderful Life has put it all on film, too.
With The Young Offenders (BBC3, iPlayer), director and writer Peter Foote has turned his 2016 film of the same name into a six-part comedy. It’s a clever, lithe and occasionally – whisper it – sweet look at the kind of boys who are, according to their neurotic headmaster, “literally the worst in the school”. Conor and Jock are young, dumb and full of good-natured criminal intent. They steal lead, bikes and kisses across Cork, while sporting matching “scut cuts” and trying to evade “shit Irish Terminator” Sergeant Healy. It’s got some movie-style chases and whip-smart gags that never quite go in the direction you might expect – the chat between Conor and his mum about whether he’s gay or not is genuinely hilarious and daft.
The episodes are, perhaps, just a few minutes too long, and the sentimentality can sometimes feel forced, but the performances are fantastic, and it’s a pleasure to watch the chaos unfolding. Those mourning Derry Girls’ passing would do well to catch up with it, not simply because it’s another sharp and silly Irish comedy, but because there’s a glut of excellent and inventive series about teenagers around at the moment, and this deserves its place near the top of the pack.
