Would you help a friend TO DIE?
Dark new Channel 4 comedy-drama Truelove tackles the highly emotive subject of assisted dying, and asks...
NIT’S MORE THAN DEATH… NOBODY IS TRYING TO TELL ANYONE WHAT TO THINK they’re called upon to honour the pact.
o doubt many a dark pub corner has heard these words whispered by mourners at a wake: ‘Don’t let me get that ill. I don’t want to suffer like that. Promise you’ll put me out of my misery.’ Now Truelove, a darkly comic Channel 4 drama about the implications of assisted dying, may well thrust those hushed conversations into the public arena in the wake of British presenter Esther Rantzen’s decision to sign up to Dignitas.
And that scenario is exactly how the show starts, with five old friends talking about death after the funeral of one of their gang. As they drink they reminisce, and then they make a pact: if one of them asks for help to end their life early, they all agree they’ll do it. Among them are a former senior policewoman and an ex-special forces soldier, and if anyone knows how to plan the perfect death it’s these two. Then, sooner than any of them would have liked,
Truelove is one of those hard-todefine shows. It’s certainly a thought-provoking thriller about love, life, euthanasia and death. But it also becomes a police drama, shot through with dark humour, when a young officer becomes suspicious of the old friends.
‘I think when you’re involved in a drama that has some serious content, you hope it will provoke some serious discussion,’ says Lindsay Duncan, who plays former police chief Phil. ‘But it’s more than the subject of death. Nobody is trying to tell anybody what to think. It has intelligent writing and I like that it brings up a moral dilemma. It shows life, friendship, marriage and death are all complicated.’
Phil is struggling with life in retirement, and the challenge the pact poses adds an element of excitement to her humdrum life. It also brings her closer to her teenage sweetheart, ex-soldier Ken. ‘It’s about promises and to what extent we’ll go to keep them,’ says The Wire’s Clarke Peters, who plays Ken. ‘And as the title suggests, it’s about true love. There’s a spiritual aspect to it all because it’s about a respect for life and a respect for love.’
The other members of the gang include Sue Johnston, Karl Johnson and Peter Egan, making Truelove a rare thing in that its core cast are all over the age of 70. Clarke, 71, says it was fun to be with people his own age. ‘When you’re the oldest person in the room it sometimes feels like everyone is looking to you for something. And sometimes those young people are not patient enough,’ he laughs. ‘Sometimes when we older people have forgotten something, we feel bad that we’re holding things up.
‘But in this company, when that happened there was a wonderful sense of support. There was a sense of, “Go ahead baby, we have time, we’re all on the same page”. And off set, when you’re working with people at this stage of our lives, it was fun to talk about which bits of your body are falling apart.
‘You can’t do that with a much younger cast.’ The original cast featured Julie Walters in the role now taken by Lindsay, but she had to pull out due to excruciating back pain. Clarke says the cast change totally changed the dynamic of the story.
‘I had a feeling Julie wasn’t going to be able to continue when I saw her being lifted out of the car. On that day my attention was just focused on her rather than on what might come next. But then Lindsay was brought in and her approach was totally different.’
He admits he’s already made plans about his own death. ‘I told my daughter, if I die of some terrible illness, burn my a**. But if I die peacefully under a tree while in meditation she should dig a hole, throw me in there, cover it up with earth and plant a tree. That’s it.’
IT WAS FUN TO TALK ABOUT WHICH BITS OF YOUR BODY ARE FALLING APART