James Rogan talks about the making of the new BBC show ‘Old Hands, New Tricks’
Article on Rose Ayling Ellis: Old Hands, New Tricks.
By James Rogan
This week Rogan Productions’ Rose Ayling-Ellis: Old Hands, New Tricks launches on BBC1 and BBC iPlayer at 9pm on Wednesday. It’s always a journey making any documentary but it’s rare to be able to say we’ve done something that hasn’t been done before.
In this series, Rose Ayling-Ellis goes into Hughenden Gardens Retirement Village and, with the help of the amazing Marios Costi, teaches the residents British Sign Language. It’s a simple idea: most over 70s are losing their hearing, why not give them the opportunity to learn a language that does not depend on hearing? Like so many simple ideas nobody seemed to have thought about it before. The official line appears to be: BSL? That’s for deaf people who are part of the deaf community.
For hearing loss in old age: ‘whack on a hearing aid and hope for the best.’ Many of the residents at the retirement village jumped at the opportunity to learn BSL and through the six-week intensive course the production team saw the magic of sign language in action. It brought out the humour, the emotion and the determination of the residents, aged 59 to 102. It showed that old hands really can learn new tricks. There are laughter, tears, learning. It really was quite the journey… for all of us.
For a nation of people who lionise the stiff upper lip, which translates as ‘keep your emotions buried’, BSL has a radical edge to it. To paraphrase Ted Evans, who directed Rose Ayling-Ellis: Signs for Change, spoken English is great at communicating nuance (it has the biggest vocabulary of any language), but nothing communicates an emotion as directly as BSL. You have to wear your heart on your sleeve to sign well, not something many British people are comfortable doing! Rose brings this hilariously to life in the series when she recruits some deaf children to help the struggling residents. As one young girl points out, ‘sign language is so much more expressive, it captivates you!’
But, for all its warmth and humour, the series grew out of the deep sense of injustice that drives Rose. Rogan Productions is a family business run by my wife Soleta (managing director) and myself (creative director). We make documentaries of all stripes, but if there is something we specialise in: it is telling stories led by strong perspectives that have a transformative impact. We watched Rose dance up a storm on Strictly during COVID lockdown. Her dances were so brilliant and her impact on deaf awareness so profound that we decided immediately that we had to make a documentary with her – in spite of never having made a documentary fronted by a ‘celebrity’ before. It turned out that Rose was aware of our work – she liked the fact that it was ‘angry’ – and a few weeks later we were having coffee in North London. Rose, in person, is much like her screen persona, she makes the hard seem easy and the easy seem delightful. She is also surprisingly steely and laser-focussed on using her profile to advocate against some of the appalling barriers faced by deaf people in the UK. She is pissed off about what happens to deaf people and pissed off that so little has changed since she was a child.
Our first conversation revolved around her experience growing up. Like so many others, Rose’s family had been advised not to learn sign language or teach Rose sign language because it would stop her from integrating into the hearing world. Her mother, Donna, decided to learn sign language anyway, giving Rose a lifeline of communication as a little girl. The rest of her world did not learn and it was very much a constant battle for her to follow what was being said. The onus was always on her to adapt and make it easier for the people around her, seldom the other way round. This led to a deep sense of loneliness.
This conversation evolved into our first documentary Rose Ayling-Ellis: Signs for Change in which Rose revealed that often families today have to pay unaffordable amounts for sign language courses just to be able to communicate with their own children. Rose threw her weight behind a campaign to ensure families of deaf children had access to sign language courses. In spite of some honeyed words from politicians and local initiatives that simple fact has not changed. How is it acceptable that in the UK, somebody cannot afford to learn the language their child needs to communicate?
But just as deaf children are often denied British Sign Language, the same is true for deaf older people. In that conversation in North London, Rose explained that in the UK, there are only two care homes – two in the whole country, one on the Isle of Wight and another in the Midlands! – that have BSL provisions for older deaf people. Instead, many deaf people have to go into local care homes, which have no knowledge of sign language. This is so that they can be close to their families, but they sacrifice access to their language – sign language. Many deaf residents in these hearing care homes find themselves in a communication vacuum, with nobody around them who can sign. For Rose, it meant that the same loneliness and isolation that she had experienced as a child could be waiting for her in old age too.
A year and a half after our first conversation, we met for lunch to celebrate the broadcast of Signs for Change. It had made a real impact: Rose had been invited onto the Today programme to discuss the issues. Ted Evans, the director, was nominated for a BAFTA. The media ran dozens of stories on the subject, The Mirror newspaper even started its own campaign. As we spoke about what to do next, the conversation turned back to the situation for older deaf BSL-users. How could there be so little provision? An idea began to emerge: what if we could teach a care home how to sign? What if we could show that it would benefit everyone?
Of course, the worry was that a class full of older people learning sign language could be the televisual equivalent of paint drying. Let’s be clear – documentary filming in classrooms is very tough to make compelling. But I had learned some sign language for Signs for Change and at the end I had memorised a speech to thank Rose, Ted and Cathy (the producer). What I discovered personally was that there is something unusual about sign language in the way it makes you feel, it gets into your bloodstream in a way that’s hard to describe. I felt confident that if we could capture a fraction of that feeling we would have something quite special.
Rogan Productions had made a lot of films about older people in care and retirement settings. We had made Life at 100, and three episodes of Crisis in Care. We were aware of the challenges (life can move very slowly!), but also of the joy of spending time with people in their twilight years, full of stories, kindness and banter.
Armed with these certainties, we pitched the series to Emma Loach and Clare Sillery at the BBC. They loved the idea of Rose taking a misfit group of retirees on a journey into sign. It sounded like the plot of a great Ealing comedy or Working Title film. They took the bold step of commissioning it for BBC1. We brought onboard Simon Gilchrist (who had directed the Great Ormond Street documentary series) and Camilla Arnold to series produce, who also runs LumoTV (formerly The British Sign Language Broadcasting Trust) and she introduced Marios Costi as the BSL teacher responsible for the classes. Caroline O’Neill joined Emma as a commissioning editor, bringing her experience of running Deaf and Disabled People in TV organisation and working on shows like John Bishop’s Life After Deaf. Executive Producing for us was Teresa Watkins who had made The Secret Life of 4 Year Olds. But even with a super team, we couldn’t be sure our experiment would work. Would anybody take up the challenge to learn?
Simon quickly found Hughenden Gardens Village, which was not a care home, as first planned, but a retirement village with assisted living options, full of self-proclaimed ‘recycled teenagers’. It captured a huge range of people from Tina (59) who has a brain injury to Eric (92) who was caring for his wife June with Alzheimer’s. The original idea was to teach the whole village to sign so that somebody who used BSL as their first language could comfortably live there. Rose wanted us to enact the change she so desperately wanted to see. But we were in virgin territory here and most estimates calculated that would take years. So, like all good TV people, we took advice from the Royal Association for Deaf People, and alighted on doing something short, sharp and immersive: a six-week intensive course. Easy, right?
Well, I think it’s fair to say the production team spent the first few weeks worrying that this was never going to work. Teaching a brand new language that has no sound was a huge undertaking for the new students, and also for Marios and Rose. The classes were mixed with a huge range of ages and abilities. It was also a mixed production team – 50% deaf, 50% hearing, so everybody was learning one way or other. One resident, Sue, signed up, even though she was losing her eyesight. Stiff fingers, trouble remembering, care commitments, ill-health all threatened daily to derail the experiment. Everyone was willing, but the challenge seemed insurmountable. Most hadn’t been near a classroom for 50 years.
However, little by little, it became clear something extraordinary was happening. Marios, who is a native BSL user, enchanted his new students, leaping across the language barrier in a single infectious bound, and Rose proved to be both a fearless leader and a hard taskmaster. When there was a problem with learning numbers, Marios and Rose took the new students to a deaf club to play bingo. When the energy was flagging, Rose introduced them to Deaf Rave, complete with vibrating vests. Rose roped in her deaf friends to challenge her new students and change their perspectives on hearing loss. In one moving encounter, Rose introduced Sue to a member of her favourite deaf club, the Jewish Deaf Association; Michael is deaf and lost his sight as an adult so he had had to relearn to sign through touch – known as hands-on sign language. His resilience and perseverance moved Sue deeply and he gave her one simple message that she took to heart: “Don’t give up.”
Rose always says BSL is for everybody and we were lucky enough to be seeing that in person in real time. The BSL bug spread out through the village and soon most residents and the staff were giving it a go.
The series raises a lot of questions about community and communication: who is included and who is not included; how hearing loss drives isolation; how learning to live with disabilities doesn’t always need to be framed in the negative. Most of all, I was struck by how eager and excited the residents were to learn. The sense of achievement as they mastered phrases (and even gave speeches!) was palpable. The process created a strong bond between Rose and Marios and the residents: The common ground Rose shared with many of them as they admitted to their fears of loneliness. The confidence Marios embodied as the residents discussed candidly the identity crisis they faced as their disability made them ‘different’. These moments were laced with laughter and tears, but all in their own way were quietly radical, opening up conversations seldom broadcast in the mainstream. Rose was doing what she does best: sweeping a community up in the excitement and love of British Sign Language. She was gently showing how little society has thought about BSL and how feasible it could be to make it available to the people who need it most. By the time she left, Eric’s family said it had taken ten years off their father. One of the students, Heather, had suffered from ill-health but persevered with the course and gave her speech in sign at the end. Heather’s daughter later wrote to Rose and said Heather used the sign language she had learned in hospital, while intubated, before she died. The BSL had been a vital lifeline for her in the closing chapter of her life.
Just six weeks had created so much impact. It established two key things: there was an appetite for learning BSL – from the residents to the staff – and it made a difference in all sorts of ways we couldn’t have imagined. The residents even organised their own classes after we left and are continuing on to gain their Level 1 BSL qualification. The experiment is a small step, but one that highlights the woeful lack of BSL in situations where it could do a great deal of good.
As Rose says, this is the beginning, not the end. Her radical aspirations continue. She is in touch with the prime minister, no doubt pestering him for greater sign language provision. For Rogan Productions, we are delighted to be a part of Rose’s mission to build a space for British Sign Language stories in mainstream broadcasting. This has been an extraordinary project made by an extraordinary team. We sincerely hope that when it premieres on BBC1 on Wednesday night, two simple questions will resonate around the country: Maybe I can learn BSL too? And why can’t there be more sign language in places like Hughenden Gardens Retirement Village? It seems like a no-brainer to us.
