JON RICHARDSON: HOW TO SURVIVE THE END OF THE WORLD, C4, 10pm
I THINK I’m losing my sense of humour. Normally I despise the precious “snowflake” types who want safe spaces and would ban all jokes lest they offend someone, but when I watched this I found myself sharing their tetchy philosophy, grumbling “You shouldn’t laugh about such things.” Am I becoming a snowflake, or am I just terrified at the prospect of the end of the world?
Comedian Jon Richardson is certainly terrified, so he explores the five most dangerous things and how likely they are to kill him.
He starts off with the most appalling scenario, Daesh getting their hands on a nuclear weapon, and he flees to the countryside with a “prepper” to learn how to survive in a “WROL” (without rule of law) scenario.
It irked me that he cracks cheap jokes about people’s fear of nuclear weapons and the desperate measures they’d take to survive. Then he moves on to air pollution and wobbly ladders, but listing them alongside Daesh and dirty bombs is just crass.
THE TROUBLE WITH DAD, C4, 9pm
DEMENTIA is horrifying. Not only does it erode personality and blank out memories, but it seems doubly cruel because we’re all living longer these days, and death rates from cancer are falling, but then up pops dementia to ruin all the good news. Yes, it says, you might well live into your 90s and bravely fend off cancer and strokes, but there’s now this awful disease lying in wait for the elderly who’ve dodged everything else.
David Baddiel explores the illness in this one-off programme. It’s about his dad, who has Pick’s Disease – a rare form of dementia which is characterised by aggression, swearing and inappropriate behaviour.
The cameras follow Baddiel and his brother as they cope with their dad’s illness, and having to endure brutal and sudden changes in the man they’ve always known.
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