Oh how the "row" that broke out about Paul Watson's documentary Malcolm & Barbara: Love's Farewell irked me the week before last. It risked engulfing what was a beautiful and harrowing programme - a victim of the ongoing "fakery" witch-hunt, which has got so out of hand. (At least it was ITV being in the dock this time, and not the BBC - the newspapers' usual whipping boy in all this.) The "issue" was the implication made in Watson's narration that we were seeing the final moments of Malcolm Pointon's life as he faded away after 15 years of Alzheimer's, at home, in his wife Barbara's arms. It transpired that what we were actually seeing was Malcolm drifting into a coma, from which he would not recover. He actually died three days later, off camera. Now, on a technicality, I can see why ITV was forced to overreact and order the usual enquiry, but at the end of the day, indeed at the end of a life, does it actually matter whether we are seeing a man's death, or a man slipping into a coma?

Paul Watson is a filmmaker of immense moral fibre who seeks to show us what we might wish to turn away from. This film was made over 11 years with the full blessing of Barbara Pointon and, in the early stages of diagnosis, by Malcolm Pointon. This was no easy film to make, and no easy film to watch. Anyone leaving their TV comfort zone to do so will have witnessed an unforgiving slide of one man into dementia, torment and eventually helplessness. Although to see Malcolm concentration-camp thin, a shell of his former physical self, being hauled out of his bed in a harness, unable to speak or feed himself, was horrifying, it was the early stages of the disease, in 1996 and 1997, that were the most disturbing, as his speech went through its transformation into babble, and it wasn't that you couldn't understand the words he was saying, merely that you couldn't understand the sense of them. Oh, you could throw the usual barbs: that it was a middle-class man who got an 11-year film made about him and not a working class one (he played the piano, was a lecturer, once had a show on BBC radio about music), but the condition itself knows no class prejudice, and although his piano skills featured heavily (he could still play when he had stopped making sense verbally), the misery suffered by his loyal wife Barbara was not made easier by their comfortable house. Put into respite care, Malcolm was given increased medication that took away his ability to walk, without Barbara being consulted, so she took him back home.

In the end, this was not a film about Malcolm, so much as a film about Barbara. Sadly, we couldn't hear from Malcolm, as he disappeared into himself, sentenced to take out his frustration on the world with uncharacteristic violence, so it was down to his wife, marooned without him but unable to leave, to explain what Alzheimer's does to people. She was strong, yes, selfless, noble, patient, but she was honest, and admitted she would like to be with someone else after Malcolm had gone, and was candid enough to admit that she missed the sex. (His drugs made him impotent.) Barbara allowed Watson to film her self-medicating with a few gins at night, and crying at the memory of a trip out on she and Malcolm's anniversary to a special place from their past that he seemingly had no recongition of. (This, of course, is an assumption. He may have recognised it quite well, but he was unable to express this in any conventional way. Barbara's pain was something we could identify with, but she appeared on occasion not to credit her husband with cognition, simply because he didn't appear to understand where he was, or what he was supposed to be doing. I expect this is a common reaction to an alien experience.)

An immense, moving piece of work from a real documentarian. (I actually don't know how Watson affords to live, his films seem to come so infrequently, by their nature.) How sad that the salacious need of an imagined public to see a man die on camera came between us and it. Watson re-worded one line of the narration, so that the emotive phrase "journey's end" was excised, and all was well. In that, all was not well.