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George Melly’s battle with dementia was filmed for TV to show families how to cope. Vicky Anderson reports
GEORGE MELLY’S fight against dementia is the subject of a touching new documentary charting the final weeks of the jazz singer’s life.
The flamboyant Liverpool-born writer and entertainer died in July this year, aged 80, following a battle with lung cancer and vascular dementia.
He refused treatment and continued to perform until the end – even claiming that, as a surrealist, there were aspects of his illness he actually enjoyed.
The film, George Melly’s Last Stand, was commissioned with the aim of showing how families cope with dementia, and even how living with it is not always bleak – but, as the extent of his illness manifested itself, it quickly became, according to the woman who made it, the story of how it is possible to have a “good death”.
Melly had less time left than he and his wife, Diana, imagined when they agreed to give documentary maker Katie Buchanan unprecedented access to their home life.
She began filming in April, capturing the last performances at London’s 100 Club – where his career began 60 years previously – for which he had to be transported by private ambulance, and took to the stage in a wheelchair. Three months later, he was dead. “George was lovely, and though I only knew him towards the end, I think I got a very strong sense of his personality, his openness, his charm and his mischievousness,” said Ms Buchanan.
She had become fascinated with the complex relationship between the couple, who were together for 44 years and had a famously colourful and open marriage.
But it was the singer’s struggle with illness, rather than his illustrious career, which drew her to the Mellys.
She said: “I saw an interview with Diana in the health section of a newspaper after George had been diagnosed with vascular dementia.
“She was talking about looking after him, and you’d think it might have been depressing, but not at all.
“George was happy and she clearly enjoyed looking after him – and I thought it was a very interesting set-up, particularly with their long and interesting marriage, and that George was continuing to sing.
“I went to meet them and they thought it would be helpful if a public figure was prepared to go on television and admit they had dementia.
“When we started the film, we thought he would last a little longer, but it became clear quite soon that he was deteriorating, physically, and it very quickly became a film about a good death.
‘DIANA helped to manage a good death – George was at home, not in pain, surrounded by friends and family. He was a lucky man.”
It was Mrs Melly who first recognised her husband’s dementia when he didn’t know who she was when she found him trying to hail a cab in the street.
As she came to terms with nursing him, she found it had its lighter side, such as being able to scrub dates with other women out of his diary so he would not remember them.
But is wasn’t always easy. As his strength waned, the documentary shows how tension ran high as Mrs Melly decided to invite his old girlfriends to visit him at home to say goodbye. The Mellys’ reunion with the artist, Molly Parkin, was the culmination of a long-running feud between the two women.
Diana Melly said: “George and I wanted to make the film to bring the experience of dementia, both for sufferers and their families, into the public eye. But we also wanted people to see that dementia isn’t all horrible – though it can be, of course. As a surrealist, George actually rather enjoyed some of the strange hallucinations he had thanks to the condition, such as the three pre-Raphaelite ladies who used to visit his bathroom.
“Watching the film some months after George’s death was very moving, and I hope that it can bring support and inspiration to others, whether they are facing a similar sit- uation, or cared about George.
“The film portrays a life lived to the full, right to the end.”
It is a sentiment Melly may have agreed with, as he said himself in a newspaper interview a few months before he died: “Our marriage began with passion and it is finishing with compassion.”
Melly was brought up in Ivanhoe Road and then Sandringham Drive, both on the fringes of Sefton Park, where he fell in love with the Palm House, which he would play a role in helping to restore in later life.
Speaking after his death, Liverpool’s Lord Mayor Cllr Paul Clark said that the city “has lost one of its most cherished sons”.
GEORGE MELLY’S Last Stand will be broadcast on BBC4 on Wednesday, November 7.
Source:
Liverpool Daily Post
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