Indomitable Angela shows us how to face up to Alzheimer’s

WOULD you want to know? If your genes carry the markers that make you prey to Alzheimer’s, and your doctor has the tests to prove it, do you get him to tell you?

Angela Rippon would. ‘I’d rather be prepared for the unknown rather than find it comes up and bites me on the bum,’ she declared.

She practically ordered her consultant to hand over the results, on

The Truth About Dementia (BBC1), and overrode all his objections with an imperious bossiness. Arguing with Angela is like trying to halt an onrushing train with your bare hands: you’ll just get flattened.

Thankfully, her scans and blood tests showed that, at 71, the former newsreader didn’t have any symptoms of senile decay and was not in one of the high-risk groups.

The fear had been preying on her mind, since she had nursed her mother through dementia; Angela’s father, too, had shown signs of the illness before he died.

She was adamant that she’d made the right choice. No doubt, if the news had been bad, the indomitable Miss Rippon would have responded with brisk, practical gusto, surrounding herself with apps and digital aids like the GP she interviewed who combated her memory lapses with a bank of computer videos.

They reminded her how to do everything from boiling the kettle to feeding the cat.

Not all of us are so eager to hear the worst. I’m quite aware, thank

DIALECT OF THE NIGHT: The devious priest in Peaky Blinders (BBC2) was offering to translate for Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), whose accent doesn’t get any less bizarre. It’s part Brum, part Hollywood . . . like Ozzy Osbourne doing a Humphrey Bogart impression. you, that something nasty will clobber me sooner or later, but I’d consider it polite if you would refrain from mentioning it until it happens. I’ll only worry otherwise.

And good news can be even more dangerous. Angela spent much of the show researching ways to stave off dementia: drugs were ineffective, and holistic treatments including sleep therapy looked like vacuous mumbo-jumbo, but mental exercise seemed to work.

A lively mind is a healthy mind, and complex tasks such as learning another language appeared to stimulate the brain so much that the signs of dementia could be held back for four years. Never one to shirk a challenge, Angela set about mastering Mandarin Chinese.

But if a doctor claims your chances of developing the disease are lower than average, there’s less incentive to keep training the brain. It’s an invitation to be lazy . . . which is bound to be unhealthy.

This documentary was at its best when Angela was revealing her personal experiences of Alzheimer’s. She spent the day with an old friend, once a successful businessman but now unable to remember the conversation he’d had a moment before.

And she talked about her previous ignorance of the condition, even when her mum first fell ill. ‘I just thought that she was becoming a cantankerous old woman,’ Angela admitted.

Simple illustrations like this are of much more practical use than gene tests and MRI scans for viewers who might be watching to compare the signs they’ve observed in their own loved ones.

Inevitably, for some, this moving programme will mark the moment they faced up to Alzheimer’s.

Elderly patients with muddled minds were just one of the problems besetting Jo Brand, back as nurse Kim Wilde in her sitcom

Going Forward (BBC4). We first met her in the Bafta-winning NHS comedy Getting On, but since that ended Jo has become a bit of a national treasure, thanks to her hike across Britain for Sport Relief. Like its predecessor, this show has a lo-fi feel. The dialogue sounds improvised, and the footage is hand-held and overexposed, as if it’s been filmed by a teenager with a smartphone.

But the characters are glorious. Kim plays mother to all her family — a husband who has wrecked their house with a half-built extension, a son who is dropping out of school to be a single father, and a sister who wants to sell their frail mum’s house to pay off her credit cards and fund foreign holidays.

Kim is no longer a hospital nurse: she works for a ‘private healthcare provider’, which sets her an impossible timetable of daily home visits or ‘attainments’.

The jargon will be grimly familiar to anyone struggling at home with, for instance, dementia. This is humour with a heart.