This makes improving older lives look like child’s play
Victor is awaiting the inevitable. Ninety-seven years old and still mourning the death of his wife seven years earlier, he spends his days watching the CCTV at Lark Hill, a retirement village in Nottingham. A self-confessed “stick in the mud”, the Dunkirk veteran prefers to dance alone at tea dances because he can’t find a partner who “fits”. What can be done to lift him from his well of sadness?
Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds (Channel 4) had the answer. Just as the broadcaster’s Secret Life of Four-yearolds franchise runs out of steam, this delightful series has found a new use for the little scamps, raising the stakes on last year’s first series by extending the experiment to three months (and five parts) to assess the impact on both young and old. Could their interactions slow down mental and physical decline among the elderly, while advancing the language and sociability of the children?
The dozen four-year-olds in question entered an alien world of wheeled walkers, enormous white hankies and canary yellow knitted tank tops, working their guileless magic almost immediately. Lavinia, 81, a rebel in her youth who has been afflicted with Parkinson’s for 20 years, coaxed shy, smart London Underground buff Phoenix out of his shell with a picture of a lorry. He returned the following day with a gift of his own.
Scarlett (favourite animals: “rabbit, spider, worm”), whose mother died less than a year earlier and whose father is desperate for her life not to be defined by this dreadful loss, found a playing partner in retired secretary Beryl. Even Victor, who greeted the cry of “party!” with a lugubrious “oh dear…”, found a dance partner.
Whereas with Secret Life… the scientific analysis came to feel tacked on, an excuse to crowbar the children into increasingly pointless experiments and give the show heft, here it was intrinsic to the project with tests carried out throughout rather than wry observations made from the sidelines. While hardly a one-shot solution for the expensive problems of care of the very young and very old, the lessons here may prove genuinely valuable. This was a deft combination of “good old days” nostalgia, the realities of modern life and a demonstration of why the future may not be so bad after all. Aside from the gnawing fear that the “Lark Hill taxi” (aka an ambulance) might pay an unexpected visit, it was an invigorating demonstration of the value of kindness in an age that often feels rather cruel.
As a general rule, if items are suspiciously cheap, a corner will have been cut somewhere along the way. In the case of cheap clothes, as Fashion’s Dirty Secret: Stacey Dooley Investigates (BBC One) revealed, this meant our appetite for cotton (which requires staggering amounts of water to produce) has reduced Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea to a dustbowl (with knock-on effects on livelihoods, public health and climate), brands outsourcing manufacturing to factories with cavalier environmental policies and a startling turnover of fabric that sees 10billion new garments produced and 300,000 tons of clothing dumped in landfill every year.
As Strictly fans will know, Stacey Dooley does a passable quickstep. In her day job as an investigative journalist, she doesn’t do profound or pretentious. Instead she says what she sees and how she feels and gets the point across. This film followed neatly on from last week’s BBC documentary, Drowning in Plastic; the cameras were back at Indonesia’s benighted Citarum river (last seen choked by a mile-long plastics raft) to meet locals enduring toxic chemicals pumped by textile factories into water used for drinking, washing and irrigation.
The brands did themselves no favours, refusing interviews without exception until Dooley prised a comment about regulation out of a Levi’s rep – at a conference dedicated to sustainable fashion, no less. And regarding regulation? DEFRA supplied a boilerplate statement addressing an entirely different environmental crisis (plastics pollution, again).
This was straightforward, no frills documentary-making and little of it will have been news to many, but the detail and extent of the damage was still alarming. While brands, manufacturers and governments have to take the problem seriously, a change in consumer habits would force the issue: as Dooley suggested, clothes should be owned, not consumed. In the meantime, while fast fashion may be saving shoppers and brands money, it is literally costing the Earth.
Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds ★★★★
Fashion’s Dirty Secret: Stacey Dooley Investigates ★★★