The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
VICTORIA COREN MITCHELL HOW I SEE IT
It's time we acknowledged just how robust the older generation can be
My favourite thing about The Real Marigold Hotel, which has roared triumphantly back for a fourth series on BBC One, is that the elderly celebrities on it are so non-vulnerable.
Society has got into a weird spot at the moment where it depicts all “over-70s” as frail, hobbling, weedy creatures who had better stay locked up until 2025 for fear of opening the front door and coughing to death immediately. Never mind the vast numbers who run, dance, exercise animals, dig gardens, cook vegetable soufflés and are infinitely more fit and sprightly than the generation of wheezy burger-gobblers who came after.
Even where it is wiser for pensioners to exercise caution (an idea that many middle-aged people are putting to their restless, rebellious parents, albeit in stronger language and through gritted teeth), this prudence risks redefining senior citizens in a reductive, wholly corporeal way. It foregrounds medical concern and blocks out all the important things like mischief, sparkle, anarchy, humour, knowledge, cunning and wit.
When Tim Brooke-Taylor died, aged 79, my husband posted on Twitter: “The world has been robbed.” I was so glad to hear that expressed. Losses among the over-75s, however devastating or tragic or sudden, are traditionally considered in the context of a “good innings”, with a sense – even after a shock event like a car crash or falling off Mount Everest – of getting towards that sort of time, like looking at your watch when a party nears midnight. We forget that it can also be a premature snatching away of someone who had years of energy and fun left to give.
This is as true of our favourite performers as it is of our friends and relatives. The combined age of panellists on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue has always been about ten thousand years, but it’s the funniest programme on the radio, Tim Brooke-Taylor was as delightful as ever and we might have looked forward to decades in his company. It was a brutal theft. Perhaps he was just getting started?
Thus, it is fantastic in so many ways to see Britt Ekland, Zandra Rhodes, Henry Blofeld and
Duncan Bannatyne giggling, flirting and bickering their way round India in The Real Marigold Hotel. Those first three reprobates are 77, 79 and 80 respectively.
Mr Bannatyne is a mere child of 71, but his wife is in her thirties which I imagine ages a chap. Nevertheless, he tries deferring to his elders and the result is hilarious.
“Do you have a significant other?” he asked Britt Ekland politely over dinner.
“Someone I sleep with?” sniffed Miss Ekland. “No”.
Subtext: don’t speak to me like a grandma, you moronic square. I’m a Sixties kid.
Naturally, this was all recorded a year ago. Broadcast in the current climate, it’s incredibly edgy to see these old-timers cramming on to public transport and hand-feeding each other slivers of mango. This is how it must have felt to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1929. (That’s right: highly erotic. I love a bit of rule-breaking).
Like watching Captain Tom hurtle round his giant garden to the tune of cash registers, it all reminds us to make no assumptions, and beware the one-dimensional definitions of the Covid context.
The very starriness of the line-up for The Real Marigold
Hotel (which is, every series, better-known and higher-wattage than any other reality show on TV, meaning that a far higher percentage of their invitations are accepted) is a sign of how much robustness and gamble the older generation have in them. My mother is always in bloody India. I get nervous if I go to Dorset. Everyone is idiosyncratic, nobody is categorisable, and “vulnerable” is often in the eye of the beholder.
So, I’m going to end this week with a few random memories of pensioners I have known. Some experiences with the experienced:
• I interviewed Professor Germaine Greer on the eve of her 80th birthday about the time she rented a Holden car and drove, alone, across Australia. It was so inspiringly brave and free. I asked the celebrated academic to talk me through what she learned about the country over the course of her marathon drive. She replied: “That it’s buggered.”
• Pedro, a Scottish poker player who could have been anywhere between 70 and 100, once told me his secret for ensuring he wouldn’t go hungry after a bad night’s gambling. He would buy fish and chips on his way to the casino, wrap them in paper and hide them in the bushes outside. That way, he knew he could collect a tasty supper on the way home.
• Writing a column for The Daily Telegraph aged 15, having won a competition run by the old Weekend section, I used to get regular letters from a 92-year-old retired naval commander. They always began with a kindly bit of life advice. They always concluded with the filthiest hand-written pornography I have ever seen before or since. Now, I rather wish I’d kept it.
• My grandma Martha liked to make the Sunday roast in advance. Twenty-four hours in advance. Chicken, potatoes, peas, the lot. Then she’d heat it all up in the morning. Lunch with her was slightly peculiar but it was never late.
• Barry Cryer phoned me last week. He rang to say, simply: “Two hundred people are flying back from Europe on an emergency corona flight. The captain’s voice comes over the tannoy. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the aircraft has now reached its cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. Relax and enjoy the journey. By the way, I’m working from home.’ ”