Our Dementia Choir With Vicky McClure (2019)

Available on BBC iPlayer

Our Dementia Choir With Vicky McClure featured the actress, right, forming a choir to enhance the lives of dementia sufferers. It was powerful, emotional, moving and did make you wonder whether there was anything that couldn’t be made better by throwing a choir at it. I would ask Gareth Malone but in my mind’s eye I can see him curled up in a seething ball, hissing: ‘I thought I had this all sewn up.’ So maybe he’s best left alone.

McClure does have skin in the game, so to speak, given that her grandmother Iris was in the grip of dementia before she died.

‘My nanna was very bold, with a cracking sense of humour and a dirty laugh,’ she said, ‘but the dementia stripped all that, leaving just a shell.’

She assembled a 20-strong choir ranging in age from 31 to 87. Julie, 50, had short-term memory loss and couldn’t remember whether she had showered or not so sometimes took a shower after taking a shower. Betty, 82, said: ‘I forget I have dementia.’ Chris, 67, had become disinhibited. ‘We like a bit of action in the bedroom,’ he told McClure.

‘He is not the man I married,’ said his wife Jane.

The scientific bits showed how music stimulates the brain in ways that other auditory information does not. Some couldn’t remember what they had had for breakfast but could remember song lyrics from years ago.

Rae, a former music teacher who hadn’t been near a piano in more than a decade, suddenly sat down and performed Beethoven’s Fur Elise perfectly.

Where did that come from? ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I thought I wouldn’t remember how to play. It’s like a glorious reawakening.’