Assisted dying drama joyfully skewers elderly stereotypes
Have you considered moving to a bungalow? In Truelove, a new Channel 4 drama starring a cast with an average age of 75, Lindsay Duncan thinks she knows what that means. “Everyone knows,” she says. “It goes: bungalow, hospice, crematorium.”
Duncan plays Phil, a retired deputy chief constable who isn’t raging against the dying of the light yet because her light shows no signs of dimming. Yes, she studies her lines and wrinkles in the mirror. But she also drives fast in her convertible, looks chic in dark sunglasses, and has ignored the memo about smoking not being cool.
We begin at a funeral, where an old pal has died a lingering death, unable to perform the most basic tasks without carers. “If I get anywhere near that, please take me out the back and shoot me,” Phil says to the old gang, friends of decades standing: Tom (Karl Johnson), Ken (Clarke Peters), David (Peter Egan) and Marion (Sue Johnston). They make a drunken pact to help each other end it all – out of “true love” – if the need arises. And soon it does, when one of them is diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and the friends keep to that vow.
Gosh, this all sounds gloomy, doesn’t it? But Truelove is rather glorious in parts, despite the subject matter. For starters, it soon develops the structure of a thriller, as a police constable notices something suspicious about the death and begins to investigate.
It also does that all-too-rare thing of depicting older people as interesting and complicated and still up for having a damn good time – not, as Johnston recently said, “either lying in bed dying or struggling up the road bent over a walking stick”. Watch the friends sitting around a pub table, or Phil and Ken on the verge of rekindling their teenage love affair, and you can see the youngsters they once were. They’re the same people, they just got older.
The drama (which is from two relatively young writers and producers, Charlie Covell and Iain Weatherby, who say they borrowed aspects from their parents and grandparents) doesn’t shy away from the downsides of old age. The characters joke about whether cancer, dementia or heart disease will get them first; dreams of a happy retirement are punctured by the reality of a small pension pot; loneliness is a problem, both for those living alone and others trapped in loveless marriages.
There are plenty of witty moments, though, most of them provided by Duncan. Wanting to avoid the attention of the police, she arranges a rendezvous somewhere they won’t stand out: a National Trust property. “Look around us,” she says. “We’re invisible. Nobody sees a pair of pensioners. And that’s our superpower.” Anita Singh
Amortally injured rhino will mewl like a dying kitten, its tiny cry ascending from the great grey vastness of hide and bone. This unpleasant nugget is imparted halfway through The Great Rhino Robbery (Sky Documentaries), a three-part documentary from director Jesse Vile that possesses the furious, hoof-stomping quality of a pachyderm that’s had enough.
This is a grippingly angry portrait of the worldwide illicit rhino horn trade – an industrial-scale hustle that, experts say, poses an existential threat to the species. Vile doesn’t pull his punches. There is upsetting footage of wounded rhinos, horns clumsily hacked off, lurching about in shock. Meanwhile, in Asia, a playboy reveals ground rhino horn has become the ultimate accessory of the mega-rich.
But while The Great Rhino Robbery offers up a cry of anguish on behalf of these magnificent animals, it also has the swagger of a mid-budget international thriller. In Europe, criminals raid dusty museums, seeking to liberate ancient rhino horns from their display cases – to the bafflement of museum staff astonished to find the horns fetching £150,000 or more at auction. “Why would anyone want to come in and wrench a 20-inch rhino horn off Rosy the Rhinoceros?” wonders a confused curator.
The other part of the story unfolds in South Africa, where traffickers exploit conservation laws to hunt rhinos and smuggle the horns abroad. Shooting rhinos is legal – provided the animal is too old to reproduce and the objective is to procure a trophy rather than sell the horn. That’s a loophole and a half for criminals, and they take full advantage. The ultimate aim, says one expert, is to drive all 27,000 rhinos in the world into extinction: “Rhino horns will increase in value. It’s a futures commodity.”
The depressing message at the end of an absorbing series is that, for all the authorities’ good work, the rhino horn boom shows no sign of ending. For as long as that remains the case, animals will continue to be mutilated, their death whimpers drowned out by the deafening rustle of cash. Ed Power
Truelove ★★★★
The Great Rhino Robbery ★★★★