TV Scope/The Trouble with Old People - Adopt a Grandad, Channel 4, Tuesday, 9pm: Shakespeare certainly didn't have a high opinion of old people, and these middle two programmes in Channel 4's four- part series on different aspects of ageing document very different journeys taken by two elderly people who find themselves in the "last scene of all".
Last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history
Is second childishness and mere oblivion
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything
The programmes were inspired by the real life story of an Italian widower, who successfully advertised for a family to adopt him. The concept is a wonderfully simple response to the fragmentation of the extended family and the absence of grandparents from the heart of the family home.
Today elderly people are likely to be marginalised, separated or completely missing from the lives of children and the generation beyond. In turn, many families lack the love, stability and wisdom that a grandparent can bring. The mutual benefits in creating a sort of matchmaking service for families and old people are immense.
Unfortunately, the programme makers were unable to resist applying the ubiquitous reality TV format to the concept. As a result, a commonsense matchmaking approach of establishing relationships gradually over time was abandoned in favour of not only parachuting the two elderly people in to live as part of a family for 10 days, but also following them around with a camera.
The fact that the grandad and granny were larger than life characters and the two families so different made for riveting TV viewing, but it did little to demonstrate the practicalities of how such adoptions might be realistically achieved in real life.
It was difficult to understand the rationale behind the matching process. The strongly opinionated 85-year-old James, a childless, retired teacher, was plucked from his suburban home in middle England and dropped into a city block of flats with the equally strong opinionated single mother, Rachel, and her four children.
It was painful to witness the potential of the goodwill and emotional neediness on both sides disintegrate into a shouting match between James and Rachel - which was all the more poignant because of the most unlikely warm bond that had formed between James and Lewis, Rachel's gentle 18-year-old Rastafarian son.
In contrast, Joy, a chirpy 75-year-old divorcee, got a much better deal in her placement in the luxurious country home of lonely, fragile Nicki, and her four very articulate, welcoming children. The children were very insightful into the benefits for both them and their mother in having Joy in their lives.
Amy (13) described her awareness of how not having a grandmother was something she had been missing "like a hole in my stomach". The only fly in the ointment in the "goodness of fit" between Joy and her surrogate family was the overworked, absent father Phil, who perhaps understandably felt threatened by his family's need for emotional intimacy in relationships, which all of his money could not buy.
The end results of both programmes were inevitable - failure for James, who felt he just didn't have the energy for Rachel and her family, and success for Joy, with the very real possibility of life- changing relationships for her.
While the programme did demonstrate through James and Joy that all elderly people do not match Shakespeare's depiction of old age, the main message was that the need to love and be loved and to belong remains constant throughout our lives.
Olive Travers is a senior clinical psychologist.