Truelove
The Great Rhino Robbery
Lying in a hospital bed after a failed attempt to hang himself, and riddled with cancer, old Tom (Karl Johnson) summed up the bitter irony of his predicament.
‘I’m on suicide watch,’ he growled, ‘and also ‘Do Not Resuscitate’.’
That’s the contradiction of current laws on terminal illnesses: doctors will let your own body kill you, but they are not allowed to step in and speed up the process.
Meanwhile, anyone who assists a suicide, even by accompanying a loved one to a clinic such as Dignitas in Switzerland, is vulnerable to prosecution.
In the darkly comic drama Truelove (Ch4), Tom’s closest friends go much further than that. Giving in to his pleas, Phil and Ken (Lindsay Duncan and Clarke Peters) take him out for a picnic at sea. Then, at his request, they suffocate him with a plastic bag and scuttle the boat.
Phil and Ken (Lindsay Duncan and Clarke Peters) in Channel 4’s Truelove
These are desperate measures. The implication is that, because the law prevents kinder mercies, real friends will be driven to such extremes — though why Tom can’t simply wrap himself in a wet blanket, jump overboard and drown is not made clear.
He and his lifelong pals have already watched another of their number die slowly and in agony from cancer. ‘You wouldn’t let your dog suffer like that,’ mutters retired GP David (Peter Egan).
Written by Iain Weatherby and directed by Chloe Wicks, it’s an immensely powerful piece of television, with a superb cast that also includes Sue Johnston and Phil Davis. That drunken but unbreakable pact forged by the friends, to save each other from protracted deaths no matter what the cost, is convincing and believable.
It’s timely, too. Dame Esther Rantzen, who has incurable cancer, is campaigning for a debate on assisted dying to be held in the Commons. The actress Susan Hampshire has added her voice to the calls.
But there’s a parallel contradiction that the drama and the campaign fail to acknowledge. Thanks to the spotlight on mental health issues, support for young people beset by suicidal thoughts has never been more open and available.
It’s an uneasy double standard, to give the young more of the help they need and deserve, while arguing that the old should have the right to be hurried to the grave when they’re feeling suicidal.
God forbid that society ever treats people with terminal illnesses as animals to be euthanised, like the dog in Truelove’s analogy.
The drama also underestimates the traumatic effect on those left behind. Tom doesn’t just want his friends around him when he dies — he demands that they kill him.
Suicide is an escape from pain, mental or physical. But too often that pain is left behind as an unwanted bequest to others, in the form of grief and guilt. In asking whether we have a right to be helped to die on demand, Truelove has not yet discussed whether we have any right to impose our suffering on others.
Despite beginning strongly, the Great Rhino Robbery soon lost its way, getting bogged down in other scams run by gangs including overcharging for laying tarmac drives
One spurious cure for cancer was highlighted in The Great Rhino Robbery (Sky Documentaries). Horn from these endangered creatures has become so rare that it now sells on the black market at higher prices than gold, in China and south-east Asia.
This documentary began strongly, with shocking statistics about the mass slaughter of rhinos and CCTV footage of thieves raiding natural history museums around Europe to hack the horns off stuffed exhibits.
But it lost its way, getting bogged down in other scams run by gangs — including, bizarrely, travelling navvies overcharging for laying tarmac drives.
Confusion mounted in the interview with a Vietnamese quack who claimed the powdered horn did confer some health benefits. The upshot was well-meaning but a waste of time.
Endless soap of the week: Freeview station That’s TV 2 has launched, dedicated to reshowing all of Home And Away from its debut in 1989. Bosses describe this as ‘a complete nostalgia fest’. Now, how about a channel devoted to 24-hour-a-day classic Corrie?