Older people have more to teach us than ‘influencers’
‘I stick up for old ladies’ rights, so I need to stick up for old gents, too’
Some young, or youngish, people love nothing more than a raging night out on the tiles – sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. I love nothing more than tea and cake with someone over the age of 80.
Old people, so often patently disrespected and ignored, can be irascible, it’s true. But as well as having astonishing stories of the past, many are charming, thanks to real manners and a (now) longforgotten sense of the decorous that was drilled into them.
It makes me ashamed when
I see members of my own rude generation complacently sitting on public transport playing CandyCrush, while an old person hovers nearby patiently hanging on with shaking hands – and not being offered a seat.
It’s clear that this country has a problem with ageism – a patronising, blinkered and plain rude exception in our otherwise furiously correct
culture. After MeToo, plus ongoing campaigns to root out anti-female discrimination and a new extreme dedication to annihilating racism, ageism seems to be the final frontier. Eighteen per cent of the British population is over 65, according to Office for National Statistics figures, so this is a problem on a grand scale.
Television presenter Carol Vorderman certainly thinks so. Last week, the 58-year-old wrote an impassioned attack on our nation’s problem with older folk. Now fronting an anti-ageism campaign for insurer SunLife, Vorderman remembered being called “mutton dressed as lamb” when, 20 years ago, she presented the Baftas in a skimpy blue dress, aged 39.
A nasty press frenzy over the visibility of a female presenter’s legs wouldn’t wash today, she pointed out, but as society hurtles towards the stamping out of every other “ism”, she insisted that ageism remains “the final taboo”. taboo .
Not all older people have Vorderman’s self-declared capacity for the breezy dismissal of ageist insults. Two thirds of those surveyed by
SunLife said they were regularly hurt by being called “grumpy”, “bitter”, “over the hill” and “past it”.
Of course they are – at 37, I already live in fear of negative references to my advancing years, but unlike them, can just about still pass myself off as young(ish). I shudder to think of how I am going to cope in later years if caught being grumpy while also wrinkly continues to be seen as a reason to toss someone on the slag heap.
Traditionally, ageism has been directed at women, thanks to the old chestnut that a woman’s worth resides in her physical beauty. But the tables have been turning, and in recent years, it’s older men that have been in the firing line. The politically correct denizens who run our institutions, including universities and the media, have been hollering to remove the “pale, male and stale” from reading lists and television listings.
On TV, men are still just about tolerated, including white men, but respect for those above a certain age has been dwindling to almost nil. The dominant sense has been that we should simply toss them out on their ear to make way for younger, more “diverse” sorts that TV bosses insist have far more to offer a modern British audience.
What rot. Having been around a long time, they have what you might call wisdom. And I can relate a lot more to elderly people talking about their military careers in the Forties than I can to an Instagram influencer with 10-inch acrylic nails lecturing me about diversity.
But could we have reached peak ageism, at least in the media? There are promising signs. Last week during a lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival, Dorothy Byrne, the head of news and current affairs at Lefty Channel Four, actually called for the preservation of older male presenters.
“We… need to resist the idea that we don’t need older white men anymore and that they should be crushed out of the way,” she said. This may sound like basic civility, but these days, it takes backbone to say it.
“I hate the term, ‘Pale, male and stale’,” Ms Byrne continued, on a roll. “As someone who sticks up for the rights of old ladies, I need to stick up for old gents, too.”
Heralding the likes of John Ware, the journalist behind the th BBC’s game-changing game- changing Panora Panorama on Labour anti-Semitism, Byrne Byrn noted: “He is pale, he is male, but he is certainly not stale.” stal Quite right.
Byrne also linked lin the dearth of fresh ideas in TV with lack of “diversity” among a editors, writers and he head honchos. She clearly meant m diversity in the usual usua sense of skin colour, colou sexuality and so on.
But the reality is that when we w dismiss older people, whatever what their sex, sexuality sexu or skin colour, colo we lose out ou on a more important im piece of the puzzle: that th which comes c from the wisdom of real experience.