My friend Mickie O’Brien, late of 47 and 44 RM Cdo, died the other day.
My friend Mickie O’Brien, late of 47 and 44 RM Cdo, died the other day. I’m not sure how old he was — late 80s, I would imagine — but, whatever, it was good going for a man who should have been killed at least twice in the 1940s, once at the Battle of Kangaw when the Japs shot away half his stomach and once when he walked deliberately into a minefield to rescue a French farmer. For one exploit or another Mickie won an MC.
The question I used to ask Mickie most often was how he managed to cope with so much fear and horror. He always replied that he had the perfect temperament for wartime soldiering: ‘a strong sense of fatalism and no imagination’.
I wonder if these are the same characteristics that helped him enjoy such a decent innings. Or did all the booze pickle him? Or was it in the genes? These are things I often wonder about my surviving elderly friends. Is there anything I can do to be more like them? How much of it is in the mind (such as the cussedness of the dear Halifax pilot chum I call Cantankerous Old Bugger — COB for short) and how much of our fate was already predetermined on the day we were born?
This being a TV review, I am, uncharacteristically, able to give you a pertinent, TV-related answer. That’s because of a marvellous experiment the BBC conducted this week in a three-part series called The Young Ones (BBC 1, Tuesday). What they did was to take a group of celebrity pensioners — actress Liz Smith, former editor Derek Jameson, ex-newsreader Kenneth Kendall, hoofer Lionel Blair, umpire Dickie Bird and actress Sylvia Syms — and see whether, by transporting them back in time, they could help them regain their lost youth.
It was all based on an experiment that was originally conducted at Harvard in the 1970s. Apparently, if you can trick an old person’s brain into thinking it’s still in its prime then mind and body will follow. To this end, the BBC created a kind of pensioners’ equivalent of the Big Brother house — interior-designed to look as though the Seventies had never gone away and we were all still sleeping under purple sheets, drinking out of brown coffee cups with embossed swirly motifs and playing Pong on our home video consoles. Just like the celebrities would have remembered life being in their heyday.
Even in its abbreviated version on the sketchy preview tapes some of it did seem to go on a bit, with lots of narratorial explanations, re-explanations and re-re-explanations of what the experiment was about, what had happened so far and what might be happening next. This is what happens, I suppose, when you’ve spent lots on the production budget (most of which appeared to have gone into hand-printing the exact kind of now-defunct yellow patterned wallpaper Lionel Blair had in his actual Seventies bedroom) and need to recoup in hours of screentime. Either that or they were tailoring it for the Alzheimer’s crowd.
For the most part, though, it made for delightful, uplifting viewing that brought the odd tear to my eye. Not only is it incredibly heartening to know that Kenneth Kendall isn’t dead, but the miracles wrought by the experiment on the various participants were a joy to behold.
Dickie Bird, for example, who’d been living morosely on his own Up North not really seeing anybody or doing anything, suddenly found his joie de vivre rekindled, his memory and motor functions drastically improved — all after just a week in the Seventies house, doing Seventies things. (Yoga, for example, which rather skewed the experiment in my view. How can we be sure that it wasn’t the yoga that really did the trick and that all the Seventies stuff was just a mammoth distraction?)
Lionel Blair was a particularly interesting case. Superficially the fittest, sprightliest and jolliest of the bunch, Blair was revealed by the pre-experiment tests to be an increasingly decrepit old chap who was just putting a brave smiley face on things. The turning point was when the programme forced him out of his ‘pretending to be young’ comfort zone into actually doing the thing he did when he really was young: he had to go to the London Palladium and choreograph, on spec, a dance routine by a troupe of blondes.
Behind the Blair rictus you could see the initial terror. But, just like riding a bicycle, the old skills had never deserted him and soon he had worked out a perfectly creditable routine, with Blair suddenly in tears at having become his old self, the girls in tears at having the privilege of working with a legend, and the Fawn and me in tears at how heartwarming it all was.
So, anyway, that’s my life worked out: once I hit my 80th year: smiley T-shirts, bandanas, a bag of pills, pumping Acid House – and the guarantee of a sorted old age.
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