ITV Reveals Truth About Alzheimer’s Death Documentary

MPs and pressure groups yesterday rounded on ITV after it issued a “clarification” over a landmark documentary in which a man with Alzheimer’s was filmed as he supposedly passed away.

{mosimage}In fact, the network admitted yesterday that the man died two and a half days later, and not while the cameras were still rolling.

Paul Watson, the acclaimed documentary maker at the centre of the latest row, last night defended the film, saying he never intended to imply the footage portrayed the exact moment of death. But ITV’s admission was immediately seized on as further evidence that TV must get its house in order.

“We are very disappointed to learn that yet another documentary appears to have been doctored,” said the shadow culture minister, Ed Vaizey. “I hope this is now the final lesson to be learned by production companies who often make good programmes that are undermined by misleading publicity campaigns.”

With broadcasters having declared zero tolerance on misleading viewers in the wake of the row over publicity footage for BBC1’s A Year with the Queen and a series of other incidents, ITV’s “clarification” was the latest example of their jittery disposition.

Last week, the broadcaster faced criticism for proposing to show the final moments of Alzheimer’s sufferer Malcolm Pointon as part of a moving documentary by Watson that tracks the debilitating effect of the disease over 11 years.

It defended scenes in which Mr Pointon is surrounded by his family as he slowly loses consciousness. His widow, Barbara Pointon, also appeared on the radio and in newspapers including the Guardian defending the decision.

In preview material for the film, to be shown next month, ITV had said: “The film ends when Barbara calls Paul to ask him to come as Malcolm is about to die. In moving scenes, Malcolm is surrounded by his family and Barbara strokes his head as he passes away.”

But yesterday ITV’s director of television, Simon Shaps, said: “Malcolm And Barbara: Love’s Farewell is a film which has been over 10 years in the making and addresses the most sensitive subject, both on a personal and public level.

“The film-maker responsible, Paul Watson, has now confirmed that the film does not portray the moment of Malcolm’s passing, which was in fact some days later. This will be made clear at the end of the film on transmission and should have been made clear earlier.”

But Watson said: “There was no attempt on my part to say ‘Today I will film a man’s death’. But by the time I had finished shooting on a particular day, I said they must mourn on their own. It has been turned into something where it looks like I am trying to pass off a shot as a death scene … I was not there for the moment of death, quite deliberately.”

But ITV insiders said they assumed the moment shown was Mr Pointon’s death, until they read a blog post by his brother Graham clarifying the situation.

Watson blamed MediaWatch, the pressure group that succeeded Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association, for “stirring up” the controversy. “If anyone had bothered to call me I would have told them the situation. I just feel that I shouldn’t be reprimanded for something I haven’t done,” he said, adding he was concerned the row could undermine years of work. He said Mrs Pointon considered the moment Mr Pointon slipped into a coma to be the point of death. “I don’t expect to employ the politics of semantics when talking about the death of the only man she has ever loved in her life,” he said.

Watson, who has been called the father of reality TV thanks to his groundbreaking 1974 slice of working class life The Family and later fly-on-the-wall series Sylvania Waters, has been an outspoken critic of some of his rivals.

“RDF [producer of A Year With the Queen] and [Big Brother producer] Endemol between them have fucked up serious film-making for a long time,” he said. He said they had contributed to a “febrile atmosphere” that amounted to “McCarthyism gone ballistic”.

“Everyone is terrified that everything is going to be judged as if it’s been faked,” he said. “We haven’t, I haven’t and I don’t. In the film it will be very clear that you are not seeing a death.”