Last of the Summer Wine

And this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Or, in this case, a befuddled old man saying in a broken voice, “Did I lock the door?” For the third time.

For a programme that made much of throwing geriatrics down a hill in a bathtub, there was something quite demeaning about the final episode of Last of the Summer Wine. In the popular imagination it's all about growing old disgracefully and shining a positive light on old age, yet the actual content seems to point in the opposite direction. Everyone has the blancmange face of a well-fed nonagenarian (the upshot of which is that it is often hard to discern precisely which old person is talking). Few of the actors can move independently. Some of the old gang (well, Peter Sallis) haven't died yet and they've been reduced to thirty-second bit part scenes, indoors and in a chair.

Painfully it didn't seem to appreciate how close to death it was. The entire plot is neatly and wholly related by the description on iPlayer: “Everyone arrives at the pub for the wedding, but Glenda receives a call to say the bridegroom has done a runner so they all head off to a nice restaurant.” Half of the show involves a pensioner on the street repeatedly running between two front doors like a harrowing documentary about Alzheimer's.

In fact it was all rather uncomfortably like going to visit an elderly relative in a home. They talk confusedly for about half an hour (the dialogue isn't simply unfunny, none of it makes the slightest bit of sense) before finally reaching a brief state of conscious awareness of their surroundings in which they look terrified at you with eyes that scream, “Dear Christ, why can't I die?” (In this case the camera morbidly dwells on Sallis's dewy, distant eyes as he quietly asks himself if it's his suit that's to blame for his diminishing memory.)

Hearing the studio audience cruelly laugh at such scenes leaves you cold. Someone should've had let this programme sign a living will when its neurons still regularly touched base with other neurons. Then this slow, wasting death might have been avoided. Instead, as in the real world, we seem to prize advanced old age as a goal in itself – no matter how lonely and desperate it becomes.

The only rise Last of the Summer Wine got out of me was to go research the fees at Dignitas.

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