Review- Terry Pratchett: Back in Black
14th February 2017
Many were shocked and saddened by the passing of Terry Pratchett in 2015. A hugely popular author he was famous for writing fantastic and surreal tales in the Discworld novels so when he passed away after a battle with Alzheimer’s many refused to believe that was the end of his story.
The programme Terry Pratchett: Back in Black serves as a memoir, autobiographical drama and tribute as well as an insight into the realities of living with such a devastating disease. The first moments of the programme show Pratchett talking with his assistant. He had asked him to record his memories because, as his disease progressed he was no longer able to write. What the viewer sees is a heart-breaking example of a man so talented in the use of language, struggling to remember simple words and phrases.
Pratchett was famously very public about his diagnosis and subsequent battle with the disease and what was so insightful and unique about “Back in Black” was the use of Terry’s own words to describe his own unique outlook on what was happening to him. At one point Pratchett (played in part by Paul Kaye) describes the progression of Alzheimer’s as being:
“like a slow motion car crash. There might be the odd banging noise, possibly a crunching sound ….but the radio’s blasting rock and roll, the heater’s on and it doesn’t feel all that bad. Apart from the certain knowledge that at some point your head is going to go smashing through that windscreen”
Later on he describes Alzheimer’s as being “a walk the park” compared to other ways one could go but concedes that;
“My path keeps changing. The trees get up and walk over there, the benches go missing and the paths seem to be unwinding into particularly vindictive serpents”
A rare insight into the realities of living with Alzheimer’s, Terry Pratchett: Back in Black is a wonderfully surreal, imaginative and fitting tribute.