At 71, Henry Winkler shows no signs of slowing down. The former Fonz is a tireless trans-media titan of content creation: acting, producing, racking up self-aware cameos in Adam Sandler movies and launching projects like Hank Zipzer, his semi-autobiographical series of books about a dyslexic schoolboy now adapted into a hit CBBC series.
At this rate, you half expect Winkler to be fronting a gameshow where contestants are required to waterski over live sharks while wearing a cool leather jacket. But before that inevitable project gets the Fonzie thumbs-up, we must contend with the arrival of his reality travel doc Better Late Than Never. It’s another addition to the expanding genre of VIP pensioner shows headlined by veteran stars. Call it the New Tricks effect because in our golden age of TV, an increasing proportion of it is looking rather silvery.
In Better Late Than Never, enthusiastic ringleader Winkler assembles a bumptious squad of celebrity codgers for an informal cultural exchange across Asia. His wingmen include cosmic octogenarian William Shatner, legendary boxer and grill-flogger George Foreman and former quarterback Terry Bradshaw, an ageing but still imposing embodiment of the US jock archetype. Along with their 30-something aide-de-camp Jeff Dye, a standup comic, the crinkly quartet try to cope with the psychological intensities of Tokyo and beyond. Yet, as was surely intended, there is a lot of grousing and grumbling as the set-in-their-ways seniors grapple with radically different notions of culture and cuisine.
If anything, Better Late Than Never might put you in mind of The Real Marigold Hotel, the BBC’s award-winning documentary series that has successfully exported veteran UK celebrities like Miriam Stoppard and Bill Oddie to far-flung regions of India to see how retirement there might compare to the drizzly UK. The format is clearly viewed as a winner, being rapidly promoted from BBC2 to BBC1.
Miriam Margoyles, unstoppable alumna of the Jaipur-set Real Marigold Hotel series, is also currently starring in BBC4’s sly sad-com Bucket, which piggybacks the now-unavoidable cultural notion that as mortality looms, we have the right to do whatever the hell we want. That might mean ticking off a series of dream goals on a bucket list or, as in the case of Margoyles’s recent appearance on This Morning, heroically consuming an entire Cornetto during an interview with Holly Willoughby.
There is a long, gleefully disreputable tradition of movies featuring oldies going wild, so perhaps it should be no surprise that TV commissioners are also putting their faith in the maxim that once you are over the hill you pick up speed. ITV has some previous: their primetime hidden camera show Off Their Rockers features a reprobate gang on turbocharged mobility scooters hoodwinking members of the public by exploiting their perceptions of older people as infirm, second-class citizens.
So far, the results are rarely subtle. Off Their Rockers is loud and proudly obnoxious, while Better Late Than Never features the widely-mocked record-scratch sound effect to telegraph its culture-clash shenanigans. Even the Real Marigold Hotel has occasionally wandered into sentimentality, while shows such as Celebrity Big Brother threaten to tip into exploitation by sticking cameras into the face of veteran actors who must be more keenly aware than most of the ways age insidiously chips away at our physical appearance.
As a society growing older en masse, though, we should be demanding TV that reflects every stage of life rather than just settling down to Countdown every afternoon, not least because that fine vintage quiz has commercial breaks still depressingly stuffed with ads for stairlifts. Until then, the best way to entertain ourselves might be simply to ask: what would Miriam Margoyles do?
Better Late Than Never starts tonight at 10pm on ITV4.
