Why on earth did Glenda Jackson give up acting? BBC1’s Elizabeth is Missing reviewed

Watching BBC1’s Elizabeth Is Missing made one of the more puzzling decisions of recent decades seem more puzzling still. Entirely her call of course, but why on earth did Glenda Jackson give up acting (something she was better at than pretty much everybody else in the world) to become an unremarkable Labour MP (something that any number of people could surely have done just as well) for more than 20 years? Whatever her thinking, though, Jackson’s first TV role since 1992 was an overwhelmingly powerful and therefore quite sad reminder of what we’ve been missing.

In Sunday’s single drama, based on the bestselling novel by Emma Healey, Jackson played Maud, an Alzheimer’s sufferer — and captured every one of her many shifts of mood with total, unmannered precision: from belligerence to despair; terrible bewilderment to perhaps even more terrible lucidity; moments of sweetness to explosions of rage at herself, others and the disease. At one point Maud went straight from assuring her middle-aged daughter how much she loved her to not knowing who her daughter was, to wailing ‘Helen, I didn’t know you, I didn’t know my own daughter’ in one hugely affecting sweep. The overall result was a panoramic view of Alzheimer’s in all its aspects, including the awkwardly but undeniably comic.

Yet, while the programme sometimes came close to feeling like it, this wasn’t wholly a one-woman show. Playing the long-suffering daughter, Helen Behan also did a terrific job of conveying wildly conflicting emotions — all of them understandable — as Helen tried hard, but not always successfully, to remember that her old mum wasn’t to blame for her more unpleasant outbursts. Nell Williams was winningly conspiratorial as grand-daughter Katy, who with Maud formed the customary alliance of the young and the old against the middle-aged.

And that, unfortunately, just leaves the plot — which, as far as I could see, was almost as full of holes as Maud’s memory.