Elton was still standing after this warm portrait
Elton John: Uncensored BBC1, Thursday DIY SOS: The Big Build BBC1 Wednesday Seven Worlds, One Planet BBC1 Sunday
IF you’re of a certain age, you will have difficulty remembering a time in your life when Elton John was not part of the soundtrack. My elder sister was obsessed with Your Song and it played endlessly in our house in 1971; later, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart with Kiki Dee became part of the mythology of that glorious summer of 1976; I’m Still Standing captured the breezy defiance of a survivor of excess in 1983; and Candle In The Wind, revisited with new lyrics, was the central motif of the funeral of Princess Diana.
Standing above them all was my favourite,
Tiny Dancer, which also is a favourite of my nephew. Three years ago, in Pennsylvania, we sat together three rows from the stage and marvelled at the magic a man in his late sixties still could make. The mad costumes were gone, as was the acrobatic piano playing, and the songs became all the more poignant for that, a glittering tapestry of the highs and lows of an extraordinary life. I’m 32 years older than my nephew but when Elton played
Tiny Dancer, we both were in tears, which tells you about the power of these songs to move generation after generation.
This has been a big year for the flamboyant singer. At 72, he is onethird of the way through his threeyear farewell tour. The hugely entertaining Rocketman biopic was a massive financial success, and his candid autobiography topped the bestseller list. The lone interview he decided to give to support it fell to Graham Norton, and while it was billed as ‘uncensored’ – which indeed it was – it was not revelatory, because when a life is lived so publicly, even private details leaked out years ago.
Instead, it became something else, a portrait of the artist as age advances, with flashes of humour, warmth and honesty, about Elton’s sexuality, his drug and alcohol abuse, his rehab and his late-life happiness with husband David Furnish and sons Zachary and Elijah.
The only odd note was Elton’s speaking voice, which sounded like he had a gumboil. Maybe that’s just the way a 72-year-old man’s speaking voice changes, but in comparison to interview clips from previous decades, he sounded like a different person. Nothing was mentioned about it, but then this was never going to be confrontational – that is not Norton’s style and nor should it be expected from him.
It was uncensored inasmuch as the answers to the questions were honest, but maybe all the questions weren’t asked. It never quite became hagiography, but it was the gentlest of probes and maybe, just maybe, because Elton turned his back on the excess that almost killed him in full public glare, he deserves a little more privacy now that he has shared his life story on his own terms.
We endlessly are told the world has turned mean and nasty, but there still are good people out there by the millions, as DIY SOS: The
Big Build proved. Around a hundred of them showed up in Bolton to completely transform the home of Martin and Heather TaylorMann,
whose eldest child William lives with severe autism that renders him unable to speak. Cramped in a tiny two-bedroom house with two daughters too, the family was at breaking point trying to protect William from noise and other stimuli that upset him.
After nine days of hard work, the house now had four bedrooms, with William’s completely soundproofed. In a heartbeat, you could see the worry, the stress, the sheer strain, melt from the faces of his parents. A company that makes a special tablet computer to help autistic children communicate gave the family one for free, and when the mother and father sobbed as they received it, I was only a millisecond behind. Shows like this are, of course, designed to make you emotional, and they certainly have the formula down pat.
Usually, when the family arrives back to thank the workers, there are cheers and applause. To protect William from stress, everyone instead just smiled and waved, and the silence was more moving than the usual cacophony. Brilliant parents and an especially wonderful sister, Scarlett, were rewarded, but so too were the selfless people who helped them change their lives.
Indeed, I am far more willing to allow for that level of sentiment in programmes about humans, but I’m getting more irked by it in wildlife programmes. On Seven Worlds,
One Planet, the main story this week took place on the Rock of Gibraltar, where a Barbary macaque monkey who had no babies of her own kidnapped one from another mother and carried him a terrifying 30 metres up the tower of the rock cable car.
Would she drop him? Thanks to dramatic music, my heart was in my mouth, not helped by the sort of editing you’d expect to see in a Hollywood thriller. It was a compelling sequence that ended well when the real mother fooled the kidnapper into handing back the baby just by publicly grooming another member of the troop to make the criminal jealous.
And it was a fascinating insight into animal behaviour, as was astonishing night camera footage of a pack of wolves hunting deer, but there was something about both segments that still left me feeling manipulated and queasy.
This series has been beautiful to look at, but attributing human traits to animals has, I think, gone far enough. Leave humanity to the humans, whether that’s Elton John in his twilight years or a group of volunteers helping a young boy to live his best life.