I watched my brilliant father lose his mind
Dementia put a stop to Jonathan Miller’s long-planned series about memory. Now his son, William Miller, has taken up the mantle
He would playfully admit he couldn’t remember ever being married to my mother
My father felt constant remorse for selling out and abandoning a promising career in medicine for what he called “the fatuous world of the theatre”. Having been “seduced” onto the stage to do Beyond the Fringe in 1960, the door back to medicine closed behind him. Trapped in the bright lights of the theatre, he felt a constant need to prove to the world that there was more depth to him.
He once confessed to his friend the cartoonist Nick Garland that he likened himself to a beautifully proportioned Georgian house, full of books and paintings and comfortable furniture where, in the attic, lived a vulgar music-hall comedian. In his mind, this man would come swaggering down the stairs in a loud checked suit, waving a cigar and making crass jokes at the top of his voice. This imaginary man would remain a thorn in his side until the day he died.
I was unaware of this man in the attic, never feeling there was anything vulgar about my father or what he did. In his lifetime he managed to pack more into his career than anyone I can think of. Over six decades he directed countless operas and stage plays, brought Shakespeare to the BBC, and wrote books on subjects as varied as the facts of life, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud.
He loathed labels and one he hated was “a true Renaissance man”, which cropped up frequently following the success of The Body in Question (1978), in which he was given a chance to redeem himself of the sins of his alter ego. In this landmark BBC series about the human body, he not only performed the first autopsy on national television, but took the audience on an metaphorical journey through the limitless contents of his brain.
Over 13 episodes, he explained every facet of the workings of our bodies and minds with the help of medical science, anthropology and philosophy, all of which was then seamlessly woven together with history of art, music and drama. It displayed his unique ability to combine the arts with the sciences, something he did again with series like On Reflection and A
Brief History of Disbelief. He also brought an element of medical reality to the deaths of Violetta in his production of La traviata and Mimi in his version of La Bohème, as well as the madness of Lear in King Lear.
As trends changed and broadcasters felt a need to have the universe explained by younger and more rock’n’roll presenters, he felt kicked into the long grass by those who once courted him and was unable to secure commissions for the programmes he still wanted to make. One example was a fascination he had with phantom limbs and how the brain could trick someone into believing that a onceloved and crucial appendage was still attached to the body and could be felt. So passionate was he about this idea that I once saw him chase a one-legged man down our street in an attempt to ask if he had a phantom limb.
But the one series he wanted to make, above all others, was on a subject which had obsessed him since being a doctor in his early twenties: memory. To be called Memories Are Made of This, the series would explore the extraordinary work, enter the debates and hear the ideas people had about one of the least understood areas of science. He was fascinated by the simple questions of what memory is, where it is, how it defines each of us as individuals and what happens when it goes wrong.
On one occasion he came close to getting this series commissioned, but ironically and tragically, as he approached his 80s, it became clear that something wasn’t quite right with his own memory. Losing it was his worst nightmare. His mother had died of Alzheimer’s when she was only 55 and, as a result, it was the one cause of death he feared most.
At first, my mother, and others close to him, began to notice small changes in his behaviour – a little confusion here and there, followed by a tendency to repeat himself. While rehearsing for his last stage production, King Lear, his designer, Isabella Bywater, claimed there were times when it was hard to know who was playing Lear – my father or the actor, Barrie Rutter. Fascinated by the effects of mental disorders, he had directed this play nearly 10 times in his career.
As time went on, he’d forget the names of certain people, the productions he’d worked on or the titles of works of art he’d been fixated by. He tried to laugh off these moments, as did we. But soon our dismissal of this forgetfulness turned to dismay as his uniquely elegant
His death was like an act of vandalism akin to the burning down of the British Library
mind faded away with ever increasing speed.
Ironically, had he been able to observe his own demise, he’d have been the first to turn the cameras on himself. Knowing this, we agreed to let his friend and producer Richard Denton film the progress of his dementia. The result is an extraordinary record of his slow and painful decline. Over the course of three years, Richard filmed tragic moments of confusion where he’d talk about famous artists only to then confess he didn’t know who they were. There were strangely humorous moments, too, where he would playfully admit he couldn’t remember ever being married to my mother.
In 2017, after years of his brushing it off as just a bit of memory loss, he was finally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. What had been stored in his head for all to experience and appreciate had seemingly disappeared into the ether, never to be seen again. In the final months of his life we sat by his side and tried to comfort him as the Alzheimer’s removal men came and took away what was left of his memory.
At the end of 2019, the essential automotive functions of his brain gave up, his body stopped working, and he quietly slipped away. Richard’s view was that his death was like an act of vandalism akin to the burning down of the British Library, such was the vast depository of knowledge now lost.
It was with Richard’s recordings that I approached the BBC about picking up on the story my father wanted to tell about memory. We didn’t get the series he’d longed for, but we did get a precious hour on Radio 4. The result is a documentary that combines elements of Richard’s film with an investigation of Alzheimer’s, and an account, by me, of my father’s life, using the BBC archive.
I also found I only had to Google his name to discover that his memory was alive and well, and that his sharp, fresh mind was still out there, to be witnessed by all.
This turned out to be the therapy I needed to deal with the grief of losing him.
Jonathan Miller: Lost Memories, an episode of the series Archive on 4, is on Radio 4 on Saturday at 8pm