'Mum and Me' - Tuesday 20th May, 10.35pm, BBC1


Film maker Sue Bourne has a string of successful documentaries to her name, most recently Cutting Edge’s My Street, Wedding Days and the Emmy nominated The Falling Man. Now with Mum & Me she has turned the cameras on her own family to produce a searingly honest, funny, tragic, yet ultimately uplifting, documentary. Filmed over three years with her teenage daughter Holly, Mum & Me is the story of how Sue and her family have fumbled along trying to come to terms with her mother’s Alzheimer's.

Sue’s widowed mother, Ethel, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s six years ago and now lives in a nursing home in Ayr. Once a month, Sue makes the 800 mile round trip from London to visit her, sometimes with her daughter Holly. The film tells the story of those visits, the conversations, the daily phone calls and the little holidays the three of them go on. The highs the lows. The guilt and the tears. The laughter and the fun.

Sue, Ethel and Holly

Sue says, "I thought long and hard about whether to make this film and expose myself, my mother and my daughter. But I realised there was something special about Mum and her Alzheimer’s because she’s taught us to laugh in the face of adversity. She refuses to be miserable or self pitying and through it all has retained her sense of humour. Everything I’d seen about Alzheimer’s was devastatingly miserable so I wanted this film to show that, in spite of Alzheimer’s, you can still laugh together and have fun."

Mum and Me is on at 10.35pm, Tuesday 20th May on BBC One Scotland.

This programme is now available to view on BBC iPlayer - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer

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