When a smile from a dying man shows life is truly worth living
You know what they say about life’s constants: death and taxes. Whatever the outcome of the General Election, you’ve got more chance of immortality than of mercy from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs men.
None of the 12 terminally- ill people in Sue Bourne’s gentle collection of interviews, A Time To Live (BBC 2), was anticipating any sort of rebate. Death was not merely inevitable, but imminent.
Some were stoic, some were sad. Some were serene, and a couple seemed to be relishing their own bad luck with grim gallows humour and a glass of bubbly.
All were touchingly honest. Each talked not so much about the diagnosis as the effect it had on them and their families, and of their hopes for the future.
That is what was most uplifting and inspirational about this simple, uncluttered programme. Everyone had something to keep living for. In the face of overwhelming odds, no one was giving up.
only one of the 12 was contemplating measures to end her life: 70- year- old widow Anita, an enthusiastic traveller stricken with motor neurone disease, was treating a planned trip to the Dignitas euthanasia clinic in Switzerland as her final adventure. Most were determined to squeeze every last moment of love and fun from the time they had left.
Annabel, 51, took that decision to the extreme — her terminal diagnosis gave her the impetus to leave her husband, move into an apartment, find a new lover and devote herself to painting.
Paulette, a 45-year- old single mother with just a few months to live, was overjoyed that her illness had brought her much closer to her own mother. Kevin, an energetic 69- year- old who loved a good project, was having a blast, organising his bucket list and funeral.
Some of the stories were heartbreaking, especially from younger interviewees: 23-year- old Joleen felt ‘robbed’ of her life, and police officer Steve, 36, worried about how his children would cope.
The series of five-minute profiles closed with two of the most joyous interviews. Cindy, 69, had chosen to stop chemotherapy, to relish the final few weeks of life. unexpectedly, death held back and she enjoyed a last glorious summer in her beloved country cottage.
And Nigel, a glumly witty man of 69, who lived his whole life ‘expecting things to go wrong — and they usually do’, had one impossible hope: to outlive his sentence by months and attend a family wedding. Magically, he made it. The smile on his face said more clearly than words that life is truly worth living.
We will all be facing the final demand from the heavenly tax collector — sooner rather than later, if the direst predictions of Michael Mosley v The Superbugs (BBC 4) come true.
The medic and presenter explained with his usual amused elan why the antibiotics that have been protecting us from infections for decades are becoming useless. There was no scaremongering, no horror movie warnings of rampant TB and gangrene, but Michael didn’t try to disguise how urgently medicine needs a fix.
Simple cartoons, reminiscent of public health film shorts from the Fifties, showed how armies of bacteria went to war with each other and evolved new defences.
Meanwhile, Michael was making a jelly mould of his own body and painting it with virulent microbes, before placing it in a glass coffin to rot.
It was a vivid demonstration of how much damage bacteria do if left unchecked.
As much art as science, the installation might be a cert for the Turner Prize.