Advertisement

Great Canal Journeys series 9 episode 1 review: an emotional but unrooted glimpse of life with dementia

Prunella Scales - (Channel 4 images must not be altered or manipulated in any way) Channel 4 Picture Publicity, Horseferry Road, London, SW1P 2TX
Prunella Scales - (Channel 4 images must not be altered or manipulated in any way) Channel 4 Picture Publicity, Horseferry Road, London, SW1P 2TX

There was a twin track to Great Canal Journeys (Channel 4), the ninth series featuring Timothy West and Prunella Scales’s watery wanderings. One track was a cruise not along a canal but up the Nile, in a grand flat-bottomed craft with 70ft sails called a dahabiyah (meaning “gold”, as in “The barge she sat in like a burnished throne…”). The other was the touching journey of Miss Scales (Lady West) into the unknown country of dementia.

But neither track was real. Sure, we don’t expect travelogues to minute dull hours, and goodness knows the banks of the Nile are samey for the 140 miles from Luxor to Aswan. So we saw sparkling water and rising birds and preserved temples – but where was everyone?

Only these two travelled on a dahabiyah that could easily take 12 passengers at £75 a night for four nights (£3,600). No one at the astonishing temple at Karnak (“It’s so big it could contain St Paul’s Cathedral and St Peter’s in Rome,” declaimed Sir Timothy.) No one even at the Nubian village of Gharb Soheil, except some tiresome string musicians in clean robes. Surely not everyone had fled for fear of terrorism. It must have been the magic of television.

Prunella Scales, now 86, touchingly welcomed a supporting hand over the ancient stones, but could still read a line or two from Death on the Nile with expression. “Prue’s memory is not what it was,” declared Sir Timothy. “It’s true,” she replied. “Some days I don’t know if it’s Monday or Lewisham,” 

They have spoken openly about Alzheimer’s Disease since 2014. Her condition seems to deteriorate slowly. It figured as the most unreal part of this journey. How many viewers with dementia in the family would like to see their loved one in her last years smiling and quoting Shakespeare and being game and funny and going up the Nile, instead of being sometimes confused, upset and difficult, and unfit to go to the supermarket?

Yet I wept to see them together looking out of the window at home in Wandsworth – “Somewhere to see the world go by” – and then overlooking the Nile, with the same remark. That was true, and we did feel for this accomplished thespian couple (“Basil!” in Fawlty Towers; “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” in King Lear). But the emotion was too easy, unrooted – unfixed as the sands of the Nile.