SLOW OUT OF THE BLOCKS
Hopefully Taken Down will gather a bit of pace soon; jury is out for now
ONE documentary this week focused on the relationship between a man and his mother, who was an absolute pet – and another in which the man’s relationship with his mother turned out to be the elephant in the room. First up was Monday’s We Need To Talk About Mam, Brendan Courtney’s follow-up to last year’s documentary about his father, who sadly subsequently died. Like so many families, my own included, the adult children are left wondering what to do with a widowed mother. You try your best to make sure she is looked after and doing well, but you also see how bereft she is after the loss of an adored husband, and never quite feel like you’re doing enough.
That’s in the short term. Long-term, you know bigger decisions will have to be made. My own mother – a Nuala, just like Brendan’s mam – eventually came to her own decision and sold her house and moved to an apartment, but Nuala Courtney is nowhere near that point yet. Her West Dublin home is worth around €400,000, but if she sold, there’s nothing nearby she really could afford, and having to abandon the area and all her friends surely would feel just like a second bereavement.
So Brendan showed her a few alternatives – selling up and moving to Spain; a shared living community in Naas in Co. Kildare; and a retirement complex in Florida that in truth looked like a five-star hotel for the elderly, with so many daily activities it’s more likely a hectic social diary would kill them faster than nursing-home torpor.
Mrs Courtney is a very young-atheart seventysomething, with astonishing cornflower blue eyes and an overall air of glamour that kind of screamed: ‘No-one puts Nuala in a corner.’ It was pretty obvious from the start that none of the options would appeal to her (as she said rather drily, she happily would move in to the place in Naas ‘when I’m 99’), until finally a new Government scheme offered hope. There’s a grant available to convert a large family home into two selfcontained units. That way, she could stay in her house and have income from the other half. Crying tears of happiness, she seemed very taken with this solution and let’s hope it works out.
The biggest take from the programme was just how limited the options are for the elderly living alone, something we all should be thinking about, maybe even now. And, despite his endless protestations that there was no way Nuala was moving in with him and his partner, it was clear that Brendan would move heaven and Earth to be sure his mother was happy; their bond was a joy to behold.
The second documentary, this time on BBC1 on Thursday, might just as well have been called We Need To
Talk About Ma’am. Britain’s Prince Charles will turn 70 this week and while most would be retired by now, he still hasn’t even got the job he’s spent his whole life training for.
How he must have looked on aghast as King Juan Carlos of Spain, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and King Albert of Belgium allowed their offspring ascend to the throne. By contrast, Queen Elizabeth looks like she’s going nowhere, unless she has decided to give Charles the surprise present of a lifetime on Wednesday.
She really should hurry up, because with Prince William and Prince George already on the waiting list, heirs to the British throne are circling like planes over Heathrow.
Charles always has seemed rather self-obsessed, petulant and diffident, so hats off to whoever agreed to Charles At 70, a portrait of an altogether different man, one who seemed quite charming, self-deprecating and even funny – who, for instance, ever thought they would see him do an impression of a turkey? I’m no fan of monarchy, and can’t see the point of hereditary succession, but I felt sorry for Charles, always walking a few paces behind his mother even at his age.
His only consolation seems to be Camilla, who also came across as rather a game old bird herself, to use terminology I suspect they’re rather familiar with, and my lasting impression of them was as a more regal Dom and Steph off Gogglebox, insulated from, but not unaware of big issues such as climate change, believing the best way to cut emissions from the Aston Martin Volante was to run it on unused white wine. As many observed, what on Earth is unused wine? RTÉ’s new drama series, Taken
Down, came with a great pedigree, brought to us by the creative team behind Love/Hate, but the opening episode was frightfully slowly paced. It opened with the discovery of the body of a young woman living in direct provision, and the disappearance of a second, but it never quite felt there was much impetus to the drama.
Of course there has to be scene setting, but precious little happened, and the acting was a bit patchy. The issues raised are important, but a programme like this still has to be plot-led rather than issuedriven, and the balance wasn’t quite right. For now, judgment is reserved.
But the real drama of the week came in President Trump’s remarkable press conference on Wednesday, which I watched in its entirety through my fingers.
His attacks on the media have been ratcheted to boiling point, and watching what happens over the next two years is going to be far more riveting than any piece of fiction television can throw at us.