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We continue to plumb Michael Portillo’s bottomless pit of misery, his long, dark prime-time of the soul. Death of a Schoolfriend (BBC2, Friday) followed his recent programmes about how the public’s hatred for him personally condemned the Tories to years of opposition, and his doubtless well-meant but grisly quest for a humane method of judicial execution. This programme explored the suicide, at the age of 15, of a friend of his from their grammar school in Harrow. It was quite a generation. The boy who died, Gary Findon, was clearly a hugely talented musician, and his year included Portillo, Clive Anderson, and the great television comedy impresario, Geoffrey Perkins. He, of course, died in a road accident in August this year, and he talked on the show about losing one of his own children to cot death.
At first the documentary seemed rather slow. Then, as the parents opened out and showed the grief — still corrosive after 39 years — it became extraordinarily moving. The signs everyone had missed brought their own retrospective pain. ‘He often used to say, “What’s the point of living, Dad?” I couldn’t take it seriously.’
Perhaps the most cruel thing about adolescence is that it fools you into thinking life is always going to be the same. Gary’s girlfriend Jill (I assume that was a pseudonym) had dumped him because he wrote her morose and morbid letters, and he couldn’t face the idea of a lifetime without her. Jill was the absent spectre — she had clearly declined to take part in the filming, and even the one picture of her had her face fuzzed out. You can’t blame her; however much people will have told her it wasn’t her fault there must be a corner of her brain that blames herself for what happened and that makes her yet another of the victims. Even his parents dared not get too close to their grandchildren, for fear of suffering again. The pool of misery was spread deep and wide, and Michael Portillo was a suitably glum attendant.
The Prince of Wales turns 60 this month, so Channel 4 had the bright idea of following a group of men born on the same day in 1948. Like the Prince they nearly all seemed to have a sense of malaise, of a life largely wasted, and most had a bad marriage in their past. Unlike the Prince, many had money worries. The Prince Charles Generation (Thursday) was, as a consequence, rather dull.
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