Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds (C4) | All 4
Queers (BBC4) | iPlayer
Dead Beautiful (C4) | All 4
Young and Promising (C4) | All 4
A somewhat unwieldy title, and I can only imagine “Cradle to Grave” took a forcible early bath (likewise “Second Chance Zimmer” and “Ten Things to Do Before You… oh”) – but Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds made for some remarkably heartening television in a week, this first of August, when broadcasters traditionally, if momentarily, give up.
No one worth their expense account would even think, as they head for Umbria to recharge and replot, of using the first week of August to launch a flagship series. Channel 5 used it to launch Celebrity Big Brother. Was there something implicit, by which I mean implicitly tediously ironic, in this? Certainly the “famous” lived down to the usual standards: already, there’s been a nicely trenchant Twitter post about “as seen on Google Street View”, and do remind me but wasn’t Shaun Williamson, AKA Barry from EastEnders, the very epitome, as depicted in Extras, of a “celeb” even his own dog wouldn’t recognise? Love Island it isn’t. It worries me slightly to have written that sentence.
OPH for 4YO, then, and something good it turns out can indeed come from America: Seattle, in fact, which pioneered this kind of toddler-dottler interaction in 1992. Ten inordinately wise and well-behaved four-year-olds were set scampering loose to mix for six weeks with 11 volunteer denizens of a St Monica Trust retirement community in Bristol, most in their late 80s, some having lived splendid lives. Yet all borderline depressed: nine of out 10 “find life unexciting”.
There was a certain mordant humour here. Asked by one of the academic gerontologists drafted in to tick before and after boxes: “Are you basically satisfied with your life?”, Mary, 86, took a dry second to reply. “Well… I’m going to die. And quite soon, I think.” There was something called the geriatric depression scale – even those who simply love form-filling must give a shiver at that prospect.
The two generations born, as narrator Stephen Mangan rightly mentioned, “a lifetime apart”, interacted delightfully: even grumpy cynic Hamish, 88, cruelly bedevilled both by having lost a leg at 14 and spending his later years mired in the business pages of the Telegraph, joined in: almost became the life and soul. Retired geologist David, 89, used to lead expeditions to the Arctic and now walks with miserly reluctance; Dutch Zina, only 77, opined of herself: “Children are very observant… someone who looks a bit depressed is not the person to jump into the arms of.” All three, all the oldsters in fact, benefited, in some cases hugely, as I reckon did the fun and funny youngsters; most seemed genuinely to miss their new pals on the eventual leave-taking.
And there’s the rub: the kids had to go one day. As do kids everywhere. Leaving a big room yawning in its soft-shoe and stuffed-sofa quietude, heavy with tangs of loss and pomade. The results were surely mixed: for all the academic glee at increased mobility, and strength, and perceived diminution (via form-filling, naturally) of depression, I’m not in any way convinced lassitude won’t set in again within a stuttered heartbeat. The best that can be taken – and it’s a good best, the best best – from this is the reminder that, of the many sins that beset mankind, one of the greatest is incuriosity. Something of a valuable, terribly likable programme and, despite C4’s rather obvious wish for it to be the start of something, it might be the start of something.
We enjoyed a necessary corrective that it wasn’t just the anguished middle classes who suffered inordinate prejudice before homosexuality was legalised. Queers, running over most of the week on BBC4, was Mark Gatiss’s inspired rejoinder. In 20-minute talking-head segments, from fine writers such as Gatiss himself, Gareth McLean, Jackie Clune and Brian Fillis, who gave us the recent knockout Against the Law, we had an unbeatable series of monologues – funny, filthy, mournful, celebratory, predatory, bathetic, heroic – of the travails and, yes, fun had by other ranks in the days before that particular love could speak its name.
Standouts were Russell Tovey and Alan Cumming, and new battles against prejudice are, it became clear, being waged every day. But for the moment I think the BBC might just have come close now to fulfilling its big Wolfenden anniversary brief. Gay stood originally for Good As You, which is how it should ever have been, and perhaps how we should leave it.
Elsewhere, we were left to be saved by Europe, specifically Walter Presents, with two gleamingly moreish series of wild difference. Dead Beautiful, nine self-contained thrillers, is French. Very French. It features a grizzled cop with a tangled love life, and many dead and dying sexy blond women. But it eschews many other cliches of the genre – to establish Paris, it is necessary that any shopping bag shall contain at least one baguette; the Eiffel Tower must be visible from any bedroom window in France – and is altogether sharper, twistingly plotted, resolved to digestif satisfaction.
Young and Promising is essentially Girls, but set in Norway, and without the preachy sense of self-entitlement, which one might argue robs it of its only point. But it’s cloyingly, guiltily watchable, simply because of the ever-present possibility of failure, and introduces us to a land and lives about which it should be a sin to be incurious. And three well-developed characters: Elise and Nenne, the standup and the writer for whom we’re already rooting, and aspiring actress Alex, for whom we’re already not.
