Betty, who is 84, thought her devoted granddaughter Kellie was keeping her prisoner. That is what Alzheimer’s under lockdown conditions does to you. She is having a better day when Vicky McClure comes to visit and reminds her of the happy time they spent together two years ago, forming a choir of people living with similar conditions and putting on a show at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham. “Best thing I’ve ever done,” says Betty, that memory still lodged firmly in her increasingly porous mind. “And we all enjoyed each other.”
The Nottingham show was the climax of 2019’s Our Dementia Choir with Vicky McClure. This half-hour special, Vicky McClure: Our Dementia Choir at Christmas (BBC One), revisits some of those who took part to see how they have fared since. When it was filmed, there had already been six months of life under pandemic conditions and, by and large, the answer is: not as well as they might otherwise have done. Mask-wearing makes it even more difficult for them to identify people; the lack of routine and structure confuses and disturbs; and if, like Betty, you do not and cannot retain the reasons for the curtailment of your freedom, it feels like forcible incarceration.
Jane, who has had vascular dementia for six years, is now in a care home. Almost without speech, she cries softly when her daughter Maria, accompanied by Vicky, is allowed to visit her for the first time after restrictions are loosened. But when they sing the concert’s showpiece song, Stand By Me, the words come to her and she joins in.
Julia, who was diagnosed with early-onset front-temporal dementia a few years ago, aged 49, has taught herself the ukulele during lockdown. She can’t remember the chords in the abstract, but she finds them as she plays. “I describe it as: part of my brain has gone on holiday and left the rest of it here. And gradually more of my brain will go and join it on the beach.”
The waters have been lapping inexorably at Mick since we last saw him, just after he had been told, aged 51, that he had early dementia and perhaps six years to live. He and his family – his wife, Karen, and his daughter, Hannah – were advised to make the most of the first two in particular. The second of those has been eaten up by the pandemic and it is clear, despite careful and generous editing, that the effects have told on this beloved and vulnerable man. “By September, October time, he won’t be safe on his own,” says Karen. You can see from the increasingly uninvolved expression on Mick’s previously ebullient face that he is becoming an island, one surrounded by a sea of love and grief.
Vicky meets him during a bucket-list trip with Karen to the Lake District. He remembers the choir and can still belt out Build Me Up, Buttercup; he would love to go on stage one last time. The London Coliseum offers its stage and choirmaster Mark De-Lisser returns to coach Mick – via video call and in person, as varying government guidelines stipulate – in the singing of Bring Me Sunshine. Mick finds it almost impossible to remember the words and Mark finds it “quite difficult to watch … I wanted him to have all that sparkle he had when he was in the choir – but it’s just not there.”
But it comes. On the night, it comes. Joshua Bloom from English National Opera stands on one side of Mick and McClure’s friend Adrian Dunbar (a co-star in Line of Duty) stands on the other to bolster the performance, but, once the music starts, Mick finds his words – and maybe even, for a brief and precious moment, himself. He sparkles – perhaps not as brightly as he did last time we saw him on stage, but a small, shining transformation takes place.
Like the original programme, this follow-up indulges in no straining for effect. It lets the endurance of love, the capriciousness and cruelty of fate, the flashes of hope and despair journey past us in turn. McClure does another wonderful job of straddling the line between acknowledging terrible things and giving them their due without dwelling on them. She is warmly supportive of everyone who comes into her orbit, without patronising and without a hint of sentimentality. It is dedicated to Mary, Bernard, Maureen and Betty, for whom night has come and for whose relatives we all shed a tear.
