The quality of U.K. TV Channel Four programmes is variable. It produces the best of TV (Jon Snow’s Channel Four News, for example) and the very worst (‘Big Brother’ and the rest of the so called ‘reality’ shows). But currently it’s presenting a series of programmes on Britain’s elderly population, the first relayed yesterday.

Tony Robinson, actor, archaeologist and Labour Party activist, introduced a programme called ‘Me and my Mum’. He had always had an uneasy relationship with his mother, he said. Now in a Care Home where she has been for seven years he visits her regularly, and we and the film crew went with him. For ten seconds, he said, there is recognition but then she retreats into her state of dementia, and there is no possibility of real engagement. During the course of filming the programme she suffered an attack of pneumonia and Robinson and his daughter were there as she declined and, later that day after the filming was over, died.

Robinson interviewed a number of people in a similar situation.

A father in care, was visited by his daughters every day, pretending that he would eventually get better and come home; his tearful wife, feeling guilty that she couldn’t look after him. Another daughter who had given up a well paid executive job to care for her mother at home, railed at a system by which she was paid £45 a week care allowance to look after her. Robinson visited a Home where there was a lively programme of activities – including a recent visit from a stripper. A 98 year old resident said all the old men who usually sit at the back wanted to come to the front. ‘Was anyone offended’ she was asked. ’No’ she replied, as if the idea had not occurred to her.

Asking the woman in charge of his mother’s care, Robinson said ‘Does the end of our lives have to be so bad or is there something we can do about it?’ ‘Probably’ was the answer, but it would cost billions and billions.

I wouldn’t want to end my days in a place like this, but then I couldn’t manage my mother at home.’ Robinson and his family felt the same, but he met an extraordinary woman who did just that. Agreeing it was hard (she hadn’t been out on her own for three years), she quoted a phrase ‘there is nothing good or bad that thinking makes it so.’

This was an unusual and impressive programme. Robinson ended it by saying that whereas we can get worked up about school dinners and spend millions invading other countries, we give insufficient thought to how we care for people at the end of their lives. ‘It’s time to give priority to older people’, he concluded.

Bryan