A grim story of a nation’s failure to look after its elderly
Jimmy Mcgovern’s dramas fall into two broad categories: the ones where the story comes first, and the others in which the message is king. In his very finest work – Hillsborough, or last year’s Broken – he can masterfully weave both strands into a potent whole. Care (BBC One) was very definitely issue-driven: a righteous rant about yet another social ill, klaxoned in the title’s savage monosyllable.
Co-written by Gillian Juckes, on whose experiences it was based, this was the mainly grim story of a nation’s failure to look after its ageing population. When Mary (Alison Steadman) had a stroke she swiftly became a bed-blocker – she managed to walk unsupervised from a state nursing home and there were no funds for the costly private alternative.
Mcgovern’s instinct is to catastrophise, so on top of the filial burdens borne by Mary’s daughter Jenny (Sheridan Smith) more were heaped: redundancy, a selfish sister (Sinead Keenan), a feckless jobless ex (Anthony Flanagan). As ever, these all brought out the fighting best in Smith. Mcgovern also compensated Jenny with a slightly too-good-to-be-true hunky admirer.
The script’s boldest gambit was to give a voice to Mary by subtitling her jumbled utterances. Thus “you climb into my waters” was decrypted as “you claim to be my daughters”. Steadman, so often the go-to comedienne for suburban shrillness, was deeply affecting. Her silent glare, part pleading, part accusing, as she was wheeled to the toilet, distilled into a look the cruel humiliations that potentially await us all.
She wasn’t the only character who Mcgovern made sure was heard. “Can I say something?” asked the euphemistically titled “discharge liaison officer”. Rather than entirely demonise the health workers, Mcgovern let them speak, mainly to pin the blame on calamitous underfunding.
The drive of the script was to call the system to account. It culminated in a dramatically satisfying victory for common decency and good sense, with a dignified cameo from Kevin Doyle as the face of officialdom. For all the careful shaping of the narrative, it was not entirely possible to camouflage the flavour of a pulpit infomercial. But as has happened before with prime time drama, if Care proves an effective loudhailer it will have done its job. ast week, David Attenborough was in Poland to warn UN delegates of an existential threat to civilisation and the natural world. It’s a long way from Katowice to Madhya Pradesh in central India, but Attenborough closed the last part of
Dynasties (BBC One) with a variation on the same homily. Keep on the same track and soon documentaries like this will belong on the History channel.
The star of this episode was Raj Bhera, the lithe and sinewy mother of four tiger cubs billed as “one of the most formidable predators on Earth”. There was a slight dearth of money shots to back this up, though plenty of footage showed her surprising prey which proved just too nimble for her.
She wasn’t fussy. A peacock in full display mode had to ditch the narcissism sharpish and take to the trees as she pounced from the long grass. But her brood was occasionally spotted snacking on a sizeable carcass, so all was well. The three male cubs, adoptably cute when small, shot up fast and were soon filling their stomachs before their sister Bibi was allowed to tuck in.
When the fun is being handed out, male tigers do seem to get the lion’s share. The tiger mums get the domestic drudgery and the endless spraying of urine territory markers while, on the evidence of a coupling we witnessed, not enjoying sex one bit. The father of Raj Bhera’s cubs has only his own stomach to fill.
Poor Bibi heartbreakingly wrote herself out of the script when she wandered off in search of fresh territory. “Her mother will never see her again,” said Attenborough, all but welling up. The demoralising reality was that humans have bitten vast chunks out of tiger territory and tigers fight one another for what’s left.
Craftily storyboarded, this beautiful film from director Theo Webb and chief cameraman John Brown had a Hollywood ending. Raj Bhera, trespassing into a village, seemed to have paid with her life for this desperate move. But no, in a choky finale she was tranquillised and released. Long may this A-list species keep burning bright.