Ageing well is the real reality show

How do old people put on their socks? My friend's question was rhetorical, if rather bleak, but to Derek Jameson, 80-year-old former media mogul and TV star, it has serious import.

Jameson was once one of the most powerful men in British media. By last year, however, when he starred in the BBC's The Young Ones (now airing on the ABC), he had the look of a man who had not touched his feet for some time, and putting on his socks had become a primary life goal.

Yet The Young Ones is not bleak. Not at all. Television cannot afford to be. "What," asks (attractive, blonde) presenter Mariella Frostrup at the start, "if you really could think yourself young?"

This tantalising notion drives the show. Of course, it's television. So although it bills itself as serious science, and is presided over by the Harvard psychologist and Counterclockwise author Professor Ellen Langer, The Young Ones is also part reality TV, and part propaganda.

Then again, that could be part of the experiment, which tests the placebo potential of a new anti-ageing therapy - where the sugar pill is a house.

As students - somehow studenthood is always plural - we would occasionally try to imagine how we'd live in old age. The favoured vision involved a rambling, shared, wooden house, full of books, chooks, pets, friends and possibly drugs, with libraries and verandahs, music rooms and kitchen gardens. It was a hop away from streets brimming with cafes, cinemas and bookshops. (Yes, dearly beloved, back when bookshops and cinemas existed.)

Later, when my mother was dying, I changed my mind. When she was two weeks from death the hospital chucked her out. The caring-sharing team it had built around her decided she was sick enough to die, clearly too sick to be at home but not sick enough - or perhaps not curable enough - to command a hospital bed.

I was too close to tears to argue. But who can argue with a hospital, anyway?

So began a grim wheelchair tour of various ''care'' establishments. First was Paradise Waters, or similar, a funereal hostelry so new that half of it was still under wraps. The pink-faced manager clicked across the marble floor towards us, adjusting his cufflinks, cementing his smile into place, smoothing his trouser creases. For only a couple of thousand dollars a week he offered my mother a small plastinated room, with a view of other small plastinated rooms ready for the yet-to-crumble. All this, and staff paid to treat her like an underachieving four-year-old.

I saw then that, however thrilling or purposeful your life to that point, you are suddenly meant to feel right at home in a world that reeks of plastic carpet, boiled cabbage and stale body fluids, a world of neat lawns, false smiles and managed atmospheric denial in which you feel already embalmed, or soon wish you were.

So I decided my young-person's vision of ageing was just that; silly and unrealistic. Old people, I saw, were undercover heroes, trudging out across the frozen wastes, not a map or sled-dog in sight, increasingly ill-equipped for the terrors that lie ahead. Captain Oateses all.