FOR the daughter of a celebrated (OBE) parish priest, she has an improbable distinction: presenting Channel 4’s long-running Naked Attraction, in which participants choose potential dates by the gruelling process of seeing them entirely nude. But, in Anna Richardson: Love, loss and dementia (Channel 4, Wednesday of last week), she offered an altogether worthier revelation, taking an unflinching look at the condition that is now apparently the UK’s largest cause of death, and that will affect one in three of us, including her beloved father, whose descent spurred her to make this film, sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Society.
No single affliction, dementia is the umbrella term for more than 100 different diseases that, by the time recognisable symptoms appear, have already seriously affected the brain. We saw the research programmes that are seeking ways to identify them far earlier — and, of course, the hunt for medications offering delays, mitigations, or cures.
Both sufferers and those who love and care for them provided the deeply affecting evidence. There are glimmers of hope: some medications slow the development, and some lines of research seem promising. While not a particularly revelatory documentary, it should succeed in its aim of moving the subject far more into the public spotlight. Perhaps the most encouraging sequence focused on the Methodist church-based dementia café, run by carers and sufferers, especially within the Afro-Caribbean community, for whom the affliction is traditionally taboo.
In contrast, the subject of In My Own Words: Jilly Cooper (BBC1, Monday of last week) applied that term to a champagne-fuelled polo match in the sun-drenched Cotswolds. Although it’s breaking a butterfly on a wheel to say it, I would have appreciated just a smidgeon of awareness that her bestselling novels depict a tiny class defined by wealth and privilege. That said, she seems delightful, amusing, and extremely good fun, entirely unashamed to value female beauty and male strength, virility, and control. Surprisingly, women spoke up for the liberating effect of her no-holds-barred fiction. At 87, she revels in still being considered thoroughly naughty.
Just how naughty — or, more accurately, evil — is the heroine of the series Joan (ITV, from Sunday 29 September)? Sophie Turner is fabulous in the title role, projecting, despite her poverty-stricken background, a convincing simulacrum of overwhelming glamour — all financed by daring diamond thefts.
The moral scales are somewhat rigged: does the violence that she suffered as a child and whose scars still ridge her back justify her crimes? or does her desperate longing to retrieve her daughter from adoption? While considering judgement, the viewer certainly enjoys the ride.