One of the most powerful docs you will see this year
It seems trite to hail the brilliance of the documentation of immense suffering, but there it is: The Parkinson’s Drug Trial: a Miracle Cure? (BBC Two), which followed four brave, tragic, funny individuals through a drug trial they hoped would cure their Parkinson’s disease, was one of the most powerful documentaries you will see this year.
The premise was as follows: desperate to find a way of halting the grim progression of their Parkinson’s disease, 42 people volunteered in 2012 for a risky trial of a surgical procedure in which a high dose of a naturally occurring protein called glial cellderived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) was to be injected deep into their brains. The show focused on four of those people, along with the doctors in charge of the procedure, during the selection process for the trial and its first half.
After Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s is the world’s second-most common neurodegenerative disease. The stakes of this trial were high, but the show’s sharp focus on the four individuals made this abstract horror into one that was overwhelmingly and heartbreakingly intimate.
This had a lot to do with the warmth and charm of Tom Isaacs, the sufferer who had the most screen time. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1996 at the age of 27, and in the years to the start of the trial, he had been losing control of his body and life. He spends whole days writhing on the floor, wracked with pain, and early in the documentary he imagined his wife Lyndsey wondering what on earth she is doing with a “shaking lump of jelly”. Then an off-screen interviewer asked him what she might see in him. “Good looks,” he said cheekily.
And so this incomprehensibly vast scourge became personal. It was as if darkness had been focused through a magnifying glass to a single jet-black point. This happened again and again. One of the most poignant insights provided by the show was the cruel reality of blind testing: half of the participants, who were unwittingly taking the placebo, were hopeless without even knowing it.
The tale was told with a light, skilful touch. Unseen interviewers gently coaxed poignant responses from the trialists and their families. Clever graphics showed how the complex surgery worked. The narration was appropriately understated, and the access the film-makers earned to the sufferers and the medical process was remarkable.
Some viewers may be aware that Isaacs died in 2017, but we will lean the fate of the other patients in part two of the documentary. It probably won’t be any easier a watch.
We’ve had Ross Kemp on Gangs, Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, and now, as of last night, “Ross Kemp on Work Experience”. Or that’s what it felt like. When you’ve seen Kemp meeting neo-nazis and being set on fire, seeing him shadow UK police officers – even tactical firearms one – was just a little bit underwhelming. Please, ITV! Send him down the Mariana Trench or something! Don’t waste him on British suburbia!
For In the Line of Fire with Ross Kemp, which is part of ITV’S Crime & Punishment strand, Kemp’s mission was to investigate whether all police should be armed? Dark times called for dark clothes and black looks. In fairness, this was justified: the bodycam footage, in which police were assaulted by, among others, a man with a sword, was horrifying and hair-raising.
The rest of it, in which Kemp trained with a firearms team and went on a raid that was over almost before it started, was… a little less hair-raising. It seems odd to criticise Kemp for failing to be attacked by a swordwielder, but that is what I was driven to do when it became clear by the end that he had not endangered his life. This criticism, mind you, comes from a place of pure respect for his gonzo pedigree: it is now 20 years since Kemp first went off to do a potentially lethal thing (Ross Kemp Alive in Alaska, 1999), and in that time we have grown fat off a diet of watching him nearly die again and again and again. Not only was this mission way less hardcore, it was also disappointingly similar to last year’s ITV documentary Ross Kemp and the Armed Police.
But it was good TV, despite some unintentional black comedy (a personal favourite being when the police officer whose colleague was attacked admitting that “alarm bells were ringing because of the samurai sword”). It was interesting, at times dramatic, and rounded off with a thoughtful conclusion. Even if Kemp could do with more danger, the police could do with a lot less.
The Parkinson’s Drug Trial: a Miracle Cure?
In the Line of Fire with Ross Kemp