BMJ No 7115 Volume 315
Medicine and the media Saturday 25 October 1997
Old fools, rogues, lovers, and sages
Colin Currie scoured British newspapers looking for evidence of agism in the print media. He was quite pleasantly surprised.
| I like newspapers and on most days read at least three, but for a
whole week in September I am spurred to gross indulgence - reading every
tabloid and broadsheet I can lay my hands on - having been asked to look
at how older people are portrayed in the press. Over the week a pile of
cuttings grows steadily beside the armchair in my study.
"Wheelchair Reggie, 82, does 8 mph up M-way" - the Daily Record of 20 September gives most of page 23 to the story. Heading home from a trip to the bank in his new battery powered wheelchair, "the war veteran hadn't realised he had swung on to the motorway .... 'I was going merrily along, but the traffic was really tearing past me ... I was really worried they'd arrest me and put me behind bars.'" They didn't. It was all a "genuine mistake." The police just drove him home. |  | |
| Sir Isaiah Berlin's intellect shines out |
"Gran larceny leads to fine" was the Scottish Daily Express headline for another oldie story of the same day. "Two American grannies who embarked on a Thelma and Louise-style crime spree while on holiday in Scotland escaped prison." An Edinburgh court heard how a 73 year old former journalist and her 61 year old companion "were traced after being caught on video concealing two aromatherapy starter kits from the Herbal Garden in the Capital's Rose Street on August 30." They were fined and promised to leave the country within seven days. Several papers note their exploits. Serious condemnation is lacking.
The Times on 25 September explains how older men might increase their chances of producing male heirs by marrying younger women. The Daily Mail on the same day describes Mick Jagger - a popular singer and musician, m'lud - as "defying nature" at 54. A 16 year old comments: "'I honestly thought, you know, all those grandads looking disgusting up there, but they bowled me over.'" And to show that perceptions of age depend very much on which end of the music business you're in, the 70th birthday of Sir Colin Davis rates only a tiny mention in the Scotsman: perhaps, for a conductor, being 70 is simply like getting your first pair of long trousers.
Former prime minister James Callaghan, interviewed in the Independent on Sunday after the publication of a new biography by Kenneth Morgan, reflects at the age of 85 on what remains: he reads a lot, including a poem each day; he writes occasional articles; keeps in touch with his large family; and helps with the washing up "sometimes." As the interviewer leaves, he is shown a photograph of the 1979 Cabinet: "the smiling faces ... turned into a roll call of death. 'Gone, gone, gone, he's still here, gone, gone, gone ... It's extraordinary,' he concluded sadly. 'All that lot have gone ....'"
On the same day the Sunday Telegraph carried, under the headline "The wisest man in Britain," an interview with Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, born in Latvia in 1909 and appointed professor of social and political theory at Oxford in 1957. He lives in Oxford still, writing sometimes, and from the pages of a paper traditionally associated with the somnolent tendency of the old Tory party a mighty and still questing intellect shines out: "I am bored with reading people who are allies, people of roughly the same views. What is interesting is to read the enemy, because the enemy penetrates the defences. What interests me is what is wrong with the ideas in which I believe - why it is right to modify or abandon them."
In just over 22 kg of that week's newsprint there were these and many other stories about elderly people: a couple of teenage sweethearts reunited by chance and eventually married after a 70 year parting; Harry Secombe, late of the Goon Show, interviewed at 76 ("I can't believe I'm that old, mate."); and a wonderful crop of obituaries for actor Jack May, who died aged 75 after more than four decades' service as Nelson Gabriel, the aging, sardonic but lovable rogue in BBC Radio's everlasting agri-soap, The Archers.
Conclusions? Nothing very tidy, I think. Old people may be variously foolish, criminal, reflective, amusing, romantic, and sometimes quite awesomely wise - if you believe what you read in the papers. Any complaints?
Colin Currie,
consultant geriatrician,
Edinburgh
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