Anna with her dad Jim (Picture: Channel 4)
The TV presenter and Naked Attraction star, 54, is fronting C4’s Anna Richardson: Love, Loss And Dementia – a personal and emotional look at the disease that affects one in three people… including her dad.
You must be proud of your documentary.
Very – it’s a real passion project. For 18 months I’d been pitching to Channel 4 to do a film about dementia because my dad has it. So when this project came up with a different production company and Alzheimer’s Society – they wanted to do a big campaign around it – I jumped at the chance. It has been a lot of hard work, very emotional, but I’m very proud of it.
Your dad, Jim, 83, is lucky to have you.
It’s a mixed blessing. I don’t see him enough because I’m in London and he’s up north, so it shines a light on the difficulties of caring, of pressures on family. He’d love to see me and my brothers all the time so there’s a lot of guilt associated with that.
What was the first clue that something was amiss?
Jim had his first mini-stroke aged 41 (Picture: Anna Richardson)
I think we’d been missing clues for years. My dad had his first mini stroke when he was 41 and I was ten. He was rushed to hospital and we didn’t think a thing of it because he was a young man.
For 15 or so years he was starting to get our names wrong but we thought it was just dad being a bit of an idiot.
About seven years ago I got a call to say he’d been rushed to hospital after a stroke. The consultant said, ‘Your dad has been having these mini strokes for some time and he has vascular dementia. He will continue to have little strokes and his dementia will get worse and worse and eventually he’ll just drop off a cliff.’ That was the first time we had a label for it.
Do you notice the mini strokes?
Yes, if I’m with him. Vascular dementia is to do with blood flow, and if he starts not to make sense in a conversation, his words slur and he gets a very spaced-out look. They can be fairly frequent and you have to try to gauge how severe they are.
How has the relationship with your dad changed?
It’s closer because he relies so much on us. When I see him, he treasures that we’ll go for a bite to eat. We’ve become closer making this film.
Making the film, what did you learn about dementia that you didn’t know?
We tend to associate it with being old, so the thing that really shocked me was Jordan’s story – he’s 29 and carries a gene that will almost certainly lead to dementia.
The other thing I didn’t know was a lot of dementias are part of an underlying biological disease and this starts 20 …read more
Source:: Metro
