Please don’t lump us all into this strange group ‘the old’

Knowing what it feels to be old is almost beyond the reach of anyone young. Moving from the heyday of your life towards its end, with the ever-nearing prospect of infirmity and bereavement, must seem a daunting prospect to the under 50s.

So how can today’s brisk young television producers and writers empathise with us? Far simpler to assume that we all share the same anxieties, prejudices and whims. It makes for easier plots and more obvious dialogue in televisions plays and programmes.

And yet we are as diverse and individual as any other group with a 30-year age gap between them – and plenty of us are growing older with relative cheerfulness and good will.

That’s why Age UK is speaking up for the old when it addresses Ofcom’s plan to review the BBC’S presentation of different communities. Don’t treat the old as a single community at all, they ask. “Broadcasters must act to rid their output of prejudicial or pejorative references to older people.” Well, up to a point. We don’t want to be stereotyped as grumpy and glum. But it would be hard to give a cheery portrayal of King Lear, or represent Lady Bracknell as anything but a scheming harridan.

The mistake is that “the old” refers in the minds of younger people to anyone aged from 60 upwards, encompassing everyone from mature teachers in their early 60s approaching retirement to residents of a local care home who can’t venture forth without a Zimmer frame.

Yet it doesn’t feel like that to us. Anyone of 65 seems a youngster to me. They were a babe in arms when I was already enjoying my first job. What do we have in common except our pensions?

Perhaps the greatest age divide of all is between those who remember the war and those who knew nothing of it. I do remember it. And I know our numbers are thinning out as the years go on. But talking about the Blitz, and adding our own anecdotes to the records, makes us sound like Methuselah to sprightly 60-year-olds who are newly embarked on a part-time degree at the Open University. It’s just inaccurate to lump us all together as “the old”.

So why does this happen? Perhaps it’s because many young writers and producers don’t actually know many substantially old people. How many of them spend time at a local bowling club, or chat to people in the waiting room at their doctor’s surgery? If they took the trouble they would find as diverse a group as any mix of ages that spans some 30 years.

Perhaps the problem is that they draw inspiration from members of their own families: parents and grandparents. That doesn’t always bode well. We don’t want family tensions projected onto every character that appears in a plot. We don’t want generational judgments about baby-boomer behaviour – the media cliché is that they’re lucky to be so well off – used as the pattern for how television depicts the old.

All this requires a rare leap of the imagination. It calls for playwrights to give vivid and varied backstories to their characters, to open their eyes to those who walk more slowly along the street, but to notice too, the numbers of us – everyone from doctors to shopkeepers who are working well past the age of retirement. The age range from 60 to 90 is as broad as the age span between 30 and 60. Our dramas and soaps could be all the livelier for showing it.