June Brown: Respect Your Elders

Cold blooded old times

It’s very rare that I find myself watching a programme that makes me both cry and laugh out loud in the same hour. One that speaks from the heart, bares it and then both prickles and tickles it in that matter of fact way older people seem to have about the big issues of mortality, end of days and that true East End spirit of ‘faaa-mily’. So it seems appropriate that all of this is done by a programme fronted by EastEnders actress June Brown aka Dot Cotton, 85 years young and resolutely determined not to talk to her family about what her wishes might be should the bad things happen and she finds herself incapacitated and unable to communicate at a later stage. Although not so reticent to ask the hard questions of other elderly folks, rather as if she was a child at the Science Museum discovering all of those buttons holding the answers to life’s mysteries.

“Speaks from the heart, bares it and then both prickles and tickles it…”

She may be older than some of these people, but she’s still asking the big kids what it’s like at that ominous higher school. Whether that’s living in a care home or living with a stroke, at times it feels so raw that she turns up, turns on the charm and then asks the gut question before heads off leaving some of her interviewees in tears. It brings a tear to your eye. Maybe that’s what she’s trying to do – heavy-handed empathy.

During this investigation on our behalf, trying to discover where the respect fell away for our elders, June also seems to be doing a bit of a recce of her own. Talking to former screen husband John Bardon, five years after his debilitating stroke, she asks him if he feels himself to be a burden on his wife – and then leaves. A bit later she visits him again, this time when he’s in a care home for three weeks while his wife has her first respite from full-time caring in five years. This time the belter is asking him whether he would have preferred not to have been resuscitated after his stroke. She leaves him and he curls up into the side of his bed, clearly upset. Doubley whammy, June.

There are uplifting times too though, don’t get me wrong. The education via a snazzy performance group of pensioners called The Zimmers. I laughed out loud at that bit. Also, there are new initiatives popping up to instill relationships between children and pensioners again.

With a geographically spreading population it’s not always easy to nip round to Grandma’s for a cup of tea and a story about the good old days, so new schemes to mix the generations are popping up – which everyone seems to enjoy.

This is a rare programme. With the non nonsense common sense of good manners and caring that cuts to the quick, combined with real love. As well as a concern that we are all going to be old one. Would you like to live that way?
June Brown: Respect Your Elders, BBC3, Thursday 12 July 2012