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Baldrick Actor Criticizes Brutal Treatment of Elderly
Times Online
United Kingdom
March 27, 2006
Tony Robinson answers questions on treatment of dementia sufferers
Tony Robinson, the actor and presenter, today criticised society’s "brutality" towards the elderly, comparing it with the scandal of 19th century child labour.
The Time Team presenter and long-term Labour activist will feature in a television documentary tonight about the fate of his mother Phyllis, 89, a dementia sufferer.
She died on the last day of filming for the programme - something Mr Robinson said was in many ways "a blessed relief" from her suffering. But he lashed out at the "crazily wrong" priorities in the UK.
"In 100 years’ time, people will look back on the way we look after the infirm elderly today with the same sense of disbelief that we look back on child labour," Mr Robinson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. "There is a kind of a brutality and a stupidity and an ignorance about all of us in relation to the elderly which is quite extraordinary."
He said he was not levelling particular criticism at the nursing home that looked after his mother. But he said "I didn’t think really she was being treated as a citizen at all; I thought she was being treated as a problem which needed to be coped with, a managerial problem.
"The home that she went into was pretty good. I wasn’t pointing the finger at a particular home much more at what out attitudes are like."
Training for care workers was inadequate, he said, and low pay meant staff rarely stayed long enough to build up vital relationships leaving elderly residents "doubly insecure".
"In elderly people’s homes, the training is lousy - it’s better than it was but it’s still kind of tick-box training that makes sure that they have enough calories and don’t get burned to death. But as far as thinking of the elderly in terms of human happiness, there is very little of that going on.
"It strikes me as quite extraordinary that if you foster a child, you can get up to £300 a week; if you are a carer looking after somebody who is elderly and infirm, sacrificing your life and your career for them, you get £45 a week.That, to me, is a vivid demonstration of where our priorities are crazily wrong."
The Trouble With Old People is a series of four programmes on Channel 4 focusing on different aspects of life in later years. The first programme, featuring Mr Robinson and his mother, is being shown tonight at 9pm.
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