Granddad, Dementia & Me review: No happy ending to man's battle with degenerative disease
MIDWAY through Granddad, Dementia & Me (BBC1) the filmmaker’s grandmother remarked: “There’s no happy ending to this story.”
Grandad Dementia and Me: 'You're NOT SAFE anymore nan'
We all thought the same and, of course, all stories rooted in real life have a sad ending, as real life only ends up one way. There are different routes to that end-point, though, and as Dominic Sivyer’s film proved, some are delightfully unexpected.
We didn’t see much of 28-year-old Dominic as he was holding the camera throughout but his comments and the short bits of narration he provided told us all we needed to know.
After his parents split, Dominic had come to see his grandfather Tom as a father figure.
Even at 75, Tom loomed large in everyone’s lives; silver-haired, energetic, charismatic even in his lowest moments.
Here was a man who’d built an empire, gone from driving a truck to owning a fleet of them, making a luxurious life for himself and his family at residences in Kent and Cyprus.
Throughout the course of his grandson’s film, these homes became battlegrounds and boltholes as Tom turned increasingly aggressive and confused and his family fought with dilemmas moral and practical.
There’s a point at which the process of decision-making has to be taken out of dementia sufferers’ hands.
Whatever capacities they might have lost, though, they tend to know people are doing things behind their backs. The resulting anger and paranoia sours many a long relationship and it had seemingly broken Tom’s marriage to his wife Pam for good.
It would be glib and wrong to say that all these people needed was a change of scenery. At the end of this remarkable film, Tom still had a condition that could only get worse, not better. He was, however, living in what looked like harmony with Pam, in a small retirement village. The crucial step, it seemed, was getting rid of the house they’d lived in for 40 years.
Tense trailer for BBC drama In The Dark
Whatever dementia does to the memory, Tom and Pam both had powerful feelings about the life they’d spent together in this place. Hard as it was both needed to accept that that life was now over.
When they finally were able to, a page turned and a new chapter seemingly began. No happy ending, perhaps, but no end to the happiness either.
New thriller In The Dark (BBC1) began, quite literally, in the dark, with grisly things occurring in some patch of moonlit woodland. What unfolded from that point onwards was a pretty toothsome tale, adapted by Danny Brocklehurst from the Mark Billingham crime novels.
MyAnna Buring stars as Detective Helen Weeks, who crowbars herself into a murder/kidnap investigation in her hometown.
The suspect is the husband of her former childhood friend and some monstrous secret binds the two women to each other, and perhaps to the new evil stalking the town. Weeks will be taking on other cases but this one felt a bit Broadchurch.
Peaks instead of cliffs, farms instead of farm shops, but a similar, apparently close-knit community brooding on past wrongs and nursing new ones. You feel safe in the hands of this solid, workmanlike crime story but whether viewers really want to feel safe is another matter.