Was BBC1’s Rooney hagiography more scripted reality than documentary?

Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the BBC bar. Why not take the ‘scripted reality’ methods of such youth hits as The Only Way Is Essex and apply them to a group of over-65s living in Bournemouth?

So it is that the chosen oldies are given one main characteristic each, and required to act out events from their own lives — events that might or might not have happened if the cameras weren’t there. Or as Tuesday’s opening caption rather optimistically put it, ‘Some of the scenes have been constructed purely for your enjoyment.’

Which scenes these were, the programme didn’t of course specify. But judging from the wooden way in which much of the dialogue was delivered — even including the word ‘hello’ — I’m guessing it was quite a lot.

We did get occasional moments of the promised enjoyment, most supplied by John, a comedian by profession, but here cast in the role of Older Man Looking for Love. Early on, he approached two women of his age in a supermarket and made a few jokes about how fat he is: a procedure he unexpectedly described afterwards as ‘chatting them up’. Later, another female peer failed to cheer him up as much as she hoped by assuring him that ‘some women like them cuddly’, especially when she added ‘I’m not one that does.’

Even so, this sort of show naturally stands or falls on whether you mind a television documentary giving itself permission to make things up — and, at the risk of being on the wrong side of history, I think I do. About halfway through, John told friends that one reason he was nervous about dating again was that he’d nursed his wife ‘to the bitter end’, and didn’t want to risk going through the same experience with anybody else.