Government left thousands to die in care homes. It was manslaughter

BLACKADDER’S TONY ROBINSON

“You are isolated, you can’t even go into those ghastly sitting rooms where people are sitting around for the whole day and watching television. And you are constantly being confronted by people in masks.”

The former Time Team presenter is an ambassador for Alzheimer’s Society having lost both parents to the disease.

He is helping it raise funds as the coronavirus crisis has sent donations plummeting.

In the last two months alone, the charity has made almost 60,000 welfare calls and received over 7,000 to its support line.

Sir Tony said: “It is so important that there should be this emergency dementia helpline. More people need help and support than ever before.

“That’s why I felt it really important to intervene.”

He hopes the crisis has helped to change attitudes to the old.

“I don’t think we have respect for age in the way that they do in other cultures,” he said.

“A lot of other cultures, people have the sense that the elderly are a repository of experience, they know more, just because they have been around for longer.”

Sir Tony spent 15 years caring for his parents.

His father Leslie “gradually lost” his excitement and concentration before dying in 1989 at 76.

His mother Phyllis’ change was “very quick” and she died in 2005 at 89. He explained: “Alzheimer’s, outside of my children and job, was my life for the best part of 15 years.

“I believed that by the time I was in my mid-70s we would have found a cure for it and, of course, we haven’t.”

He was heartened by the praise for Colonel Tom Moore, the 100-year-old war vet who has raised £33million for NHS charities by walking laps of his garden in Bedfordshire.

But Tony believes the story may have obscured a wider picture of old people suffering.

He said: “Colonel Tom was praised to the ceiling, which is quite right.

“But while we were making such a fuss of him, all the other

Colonel Toms were in care homes being treated like s***.

“It was just too embarrassing and too hard to think about it.

“What we would rather do is be romantic about one person who is being noble rather than think, ‘What is my responsibility?’

There was a double standard.” As Tony continues to raise awareness about Alzheimer’s he says he won’t retire until he’s “too infirm to carry on” adding: “My work defines me”.

Now he’s doing his best to fend off the killer with a diet and fitness regime.

“It’s about staying fit, eating right and doing as much as you can to exercise your brain. I do all those things because I know how ghastly it can be. I’m philosophical, you can’t plan these things, you just better bloody do your best,” he said.

“I don’t really feel very different. At the moment I am in the gym for about one hour 20 minutes every evening.

“I do it while watching re-runs of Wallander. I’m reading a lot, I’m walking an awful lot.

“The problem is the infirm elderly. Most people my age, when something s*** happens, we don’t have the mechanism to heal as fast.”

Support Alzheimer’s Society’s Emergency Appeal at alzheimers.org.uk/emergency. Voice of Sunday People: P14