First-rate TV, Ed... but this is a crisis you promised to fix
Inside The Care Crisis With Ed Balls Monday, BBC2 ★★★★★ Close To Me Sunday, Channel 4
★★★★★
Ed Balls was an MP for ten years, and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer for four years and, as he said in this documentary, where he spent two weeks working in nursing homes: ‘We promised to fix the care system but we failed.’ An honest admission, but also, did you think, as I did: ‘It’s easy to say that now, as a jobbing broadcaster, but why didn’t you do this then?’ Perhaps I’m just getting curmudgeonly in my own old age. (Good tip: never look downwards in a mirror, ever.) But when one carer said to Balls, and all politicians generally: ‘You’ll need our care one day and I’m not wiping your bum’, I was minded to applaud.
However, none of this is to say that Inside The Care Crisis With Ed Balls wasn’t, in other ways, a first-rate and important programme, if a painful one. For the first episode (of two) he spent a week in two care homes, one of which specialised in dementia. He was unflinchingly compassionate and respectful. He washed and creamed 94-year-old Phyllis’s legs. (‘I don’t like this old age,’ said Phyllis, although whether this suddenly came upon her when she noted it was Ed Balls performing her ablutions wasn’t clear.)
He helped a terrified Kathleen down the stairs. He hovered around Frank, whose dementia meant he could become violent. Two carers disappeared into his room. ‘Now, Frank, don’t hurt Alison today,’ one said. At one point the camera in Phyllis’s room panned to photographs of her as a little girl and it seemed impossible that anyone could go from then to as she was now. We opt not to think about it, but this forced you to. Will I be a Phyllis, a Kathleen or a Frank?, is what I kept thinking. It was all quite terrifying.
Ed visited his own mother, who suffers from vascular dementia and has been in a home for three years. He had not seen her for 16 months due to Covid restrictions. This was incredibly moving. She could not speak but, and I know this sounds trite, she looked lovely, all freshly coiffured, which I think is important. Phyllis, you may have noted, had prettily painted fingernails. Touchingly, someone had taken the trouble to do that.
As for the carers, they are angels. My father had a carer (hello, Sandy) at home for the last year of his life and his delusions were so severe by the end that we had to fix a bolt on the inside of her door and hide all the knives, but her dedication and understanding never wavered. Carers wipe, mop, feed, reassure, entertain, hoist, suffer blows and will stay and hold your hand if you die in the middle of the night. For which they are paid £9.50 an hour. As one said: ‘We are the bottom of the pile.’ And as another said: ‘We are unskilled workers, right? We’re nothing.’
There is no career structure, no status and, as we learned, 149,000 workers left the care sector in 2019. Post-Covid, the system is, we were told, ‘teetering on the edge’. But this is where we needed less emotive language and more facts. These particular homes are part of a family-run business owned by a father and son. They said that the business wouldn’t be viable in six months’ time as 11 beds remained empty, at a cost of £33,000 a month to the home. Families were worried and new residents, they said, were scarce.
But what are the associated costs, and what has been their profit in past years? Should care be a profitable private enterprise? When they said they hoped for full occupancy so they could pay their staff more, did they actually pay them more when that was the case? This side was ignored, frustratingly. But the programme did make you think, as painful as that is. And I’m still thinking about it now.
On to Close To Me, Channel 4’s latest thriller, starring Connie Nielsen, as well as Christopher Eccleston with very strange hair, as a married couple. She falls down the stairs and loses all memory of the previous year. Was she drunk? Was she pushed? Where’s her phone? Did she have sex with the hot young gardener? Yes, it’s our old friend, dark secrets. And it’s ludicrously scripted.
There’s not only her jarring internal narration, but also when she asks the hot young gardener if she slept with him he says: ‘Well, I have handled your lobelia’, which made me want to crawl off and die right there. Plus it’s yet another thriller set in a Grand Designs-style house by the sea.
One other tip for you: if you want to be safe, move to a modest one-bed flat in Coton in the Elms, the village in Derbyshire that, at 70 miles from the coast, is Britain’s most inland place. No one will bother you there.