Grey Voyagers RTE1, Monday
Through The Eyes of the Old BBC1, Wednesday
Clocking Off BBC1, Monday
I can't pretend to know much about these things, but it seems to me that there are lots of programmes on television for old people, but not a hell of a lot about them. There has to be more to television than Open House, Countdown, Telly Bingo and Mike Murphy scaring the living daylights out of the contestants on Winning Streak. The soaps have the odd stab at elderly storylines, but seem increasingly concerned with filling themselves with good-looking teenagers. You can understand why Last of the Summer Wine was so popular, given that it was the only thing which seemed to speak for the elderly rather than to them. Television, like so much else, is predominantly made by the young for the young.
This, though, was a good week to be grey. Grey Voyagers: Cyber Sisters followed 72-year-old Kate Walshe as she travelled across the US, meeting the three women she had befriended after her husband's death. It was made remarkable by the fact that she had become agoraphobic after his death, afraid of the world and the people in it, and had met her new friends through Internet chatrooms, but not face to face until her trip.
She took the train from New York to Chicago and Denver, and with each meeting you would have needed a heart of the coldest stone not to have been moved. She went from a woman petrified of what people would think of her to one wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "I'd worry about getting older if I wasn't so damn sexy". She strutted around in it, with a gold cross hanging on the outside and a bright white pair of runners, like a rapping granny so crammed full of renewed life that some of it couldn't help overflowing. "I'm an evangelist and my message for the women of Ireland is: `Go, women, go. Go for it. Especially at funerals'."
And by the end, all those fears of the world were gone, thrown away like clothes abandoned on a shore line. "When I am old I will wear purple," she affirmed. "I'll wear purple, and feck the begrudgers. Feck 'em. It's great." Kate would have liked Margaret. "Come 60, for some daft reason it is assumed that from then on you are headed for the workhouse. You are bound to be old, you need free bus passes, you've to be patronised, you want classes in flower arrangement. It makes me scream."
The 94-year-old featured in Chris Terrill's feature-length documentary Through the Eyes of the Old, which aimed, "often literally, thanks to the use of a tiny camera hitched on their glasses", to give us the world from those that have lived in it longest. Margaret admitted that she felt years younger just talking to the camera, because it was a rare occasion in which someone thought her important enough to ask questions, to learn from her. "We need a place for the elders of the tribe. To remind us that loyalty is worth more than money, that love is worth more than money."
Terrill pulled one deft trick when we were introduced to Stuart (79), who stared out the window of his small room at the rabbits playing on the grass. It was obviously an institution. "Did you ever think you would end up in a place like this?" Terrill asked. "No," replied Stuart. But it wasn't a home at all, but a prison. Stuart was doing time for conning a woman out of more than £1,000. She was 86.
But that was the only trickery in an otherwise straight-as-a-die documentary. There were plenty of stories. There was Molly (70), the last of her family, broke, with nothing but the four walls and the telly to look at all day. Archie (95), living the military life in a home for veterans, was a man who would probably rise up and fight the enemy single-handed if ever called on again. Joy and Connie (60-somethings) larging it up in Tenerife and wherever else they could get a drink and a squeeze. Forget about wearing just purple, they went for every primary colour of the rainbow in one delirious combo, wore their hair high and their skirts higher and didn't care who saw them.
Most moving of all were Betty and John, who felt cheated out of what they had hoped would be a quiet retirement together when he suffered a paralysing stroke. Their love for each other was so strong that it moved each of them to tears as they spoke about it.
It was worth noting that the protest power of the elderly is more potent than you might otherwise assume. A group was followed as they regularly took to the streets and blocked traffic, demanding a re-instatement of their pension rights. Now, if you are a policeman, are you likely to weigh in heavily on them with batons and tear gas? They did their best to move the protesters gently, but met their match in 77-year-old Zelda, who refused to let her Parkinson's get in the way, unless it became an advantage. The policeman beckoned her to get up off the road. "I will, but I'll have to take my time standing up."
The policeman and the London busses backed up behind her waited patiently while she took a very long time indeed. She headed home after discussing plans for a Thursday demo with Bobbies in the van. "Good luck," offered the nice young man in a uniform. They should be drafted any time the rest of us need anything.
Being a British documentary, the "war" loomed large; a reminder of how, as 83-year-old Sir Christopher put it, it turned a "pretty useless lot" into those who gave their lives for the survival of the free world.
The programme ended at the Remembrance celebrations, with the prayer for the fallen, "They shall not grow old as we grow old . . ."
Paul Abbott's Clocking Off returned for a second series this week and reminded us why the first was received with such acclaim. There is a superficial gloss to it which suckers you into thinking that it is nothing more than comedy drama, a working-class knockabout set in a Manchester textiles factory. That's what Abbott wants you to think. He drops you into a fully-formed world of work banter, socialising, sex and relationships, and throws in a bit of Grand Old Opry-type music to drive it along. Then he pulls the rug from underneath your feet.
Each episode starts with the bell at the end of the working day, and the camera follows somebody out of the factory gates and home. It's an ingenious device which, in theory, gives endless possibilities without ever needing a running, all-encompassing storyline. As long as the factory is there, so are the people. The only battle will be against turning it into soap.
Given the current climate in the UK, it took skill and more than a little bravery to start a new run with a storyline about paedophilia.
It was done only with the quiet shock that comes with half-formed suspicions, as factory worker Kevin spies his neighbour and work-mate Brian apparently surfing the Web for child porn. But Abbott has a way of making you as uncertain as his characters over the truth. Kevin volunteers to help out at the youth club Brian runs, and ends up buried under a pile of kids at a football match. The child lighting a cigarette as he leaves Brian's house hints at horrific goings on, until we discover that it's only his son visiting. Brian berates Kevin for cheating on his own girlfriend with a look of admonishing contempt. And because he hasn't told anyone of what he has seen, Kevin's clumsy, confused attempts to hurt Brian - clobbering him in a football match, not picking him up for work - only serve to isolate Kevin from the tightly-knit factory.
The episode was filled with the familiar notions of sex. The jokes, Kevin's post-coital chats as his girlfriend paints her toenails, his own porn collection, a stripper at his brother's party. It points up the abnormality of the activity, but also delicately layers things in a confusion that allows for Kevin's uncertainty and the ambiguity of the outcome. Brian, of course, is a paedophile after all, but his answer to Kevin when finally confronted by him is to produce photos of the football game, with Kevin celebrating a goal with the children while topless. "Mud sticks," Brian tells him.
So, it's Kevin who moves out of the street rather than deal with the consequences, a twist to the recent witch-hunts that could have been disastrous, but was so delicately constructed as to be utterly plausible. Therein lies the brilliance of Clocking Off. It asks questions, and just because you can't find the answers doesn't make it any less satisfying.
shegarty@irish-times.ie
