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Kevin Whately on Dementia

Kevin Whately and dementia sufferer
  • Posted at 12:02pm
  • 27 March 2009
  • by DavidButcher-RT
  • 1 comment

You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a programme title less tempting than Kevin Whately on Dementia (23 March ITV1), but let's try, shall we? How about Giles Brandreth on Shingles or An Audience with Martin Shaw?

No, I think Mr Whately edges it. No offence to him, but we know to our cost that actors make dreadful presenters. I hate to drag up Extreme Fishing with Robson Green again, but it's an obvious whipping boy, and short of Five commissioning Extreme Embroidery with Trevor Eve, likely to remain in a class of its own.

So well done, then, to the 3.6 million of us who, undaunted by the title, tuned in to Kevin Whately's Tonight film and were rewarded with a calm, thoughtful and quietly heartfelt piece about a serious issue.

If he weren't already a well-known actor, Whately would never get a job as a TV presenter. For a start, he hasn't got a clue about the degree of macho posturing required. He'd have to learn to boom at the camera in a self-important voice as if reporting the Last Judgement. He'd need to practise shoving a microphone in front of guilty men. He'd need to radiate an air of defending the moral high ground.

Instead, Whately spoke humbly and from experience: his mother has had Alzheimer's for the past eight years and is now in a care home. That meant his empathy with the interviewees felt real rather than forced. In one fleeting shot, we noticed him put a hand on John Suchet's shoulder as the latter spoke about the trauma of seeing his wife's personality disappear. No big deal, but it felt sincere.

He also covered the issues: how the right drugs and proper care techniques should be more widely available; how we'd better figure this thing out because one in three of us who lives to 65 will get the disease. It was a textbook current affairs programme and it made you wish Whately would spend less time investigating picturesque murders in Lewis and more time tackling issues that matter. Someone give the man a series.

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  • Posted on 28 March 2009
  • at 7:51am
  • by frederic

i read the first paragraph only and was not impressed by the writer's approach, deducing that the rest of the article was not worth my time

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