Thomas Sutcliffe: Malcolm and Barbara: flawed but virtuous

Paul Watson is a film-maker who prides himself on being a cut above most of his colleagues. In fact he opened his last documentary - Rain in My Heart - with a little vignette in which he attempted to convey the superiority of his methods and motives to a suspicious hospital administrator: "I make documentaries which are about real things that happen," he explained pointedly. Which makes it awkward for him, to say the least, that he should now find himself caught in the latest of television's falsification scandals - that concerning the exact nature of the climactic scene of Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell. The film, sequel to a critically acclaimed documentary about a couple coping with the husband's Alzheimer's, was widely reported as capturing the moment of Malcolm's death, though it soon emerged that what the film actually showed was the moment when Malcolm slipped into his final coma, and that he actually died a few days later. Watson then claimed that the false impression was the responsibility of ITV's publicity machine - and that he'd strenuously attempted to clarify matters, though this attempt at clarification seems to have been made after the false impression had been revealed, not, rather oddly, when the taboo-busting fuss it had caused was at its height.

Intriguing then, to reach the critical moment in my review copy of the film and find the following line on the voiceover: "I have been making this film for 11 years so did not think when Barbara called me on 8 February 2007 that by day's end Malcolm's journey would be done." This wasn't a line from a press release... it was Watson's own commentary, recorded in his voice... and - without categorical false statement - I think it clearly invites the viewer to believe that Malcolm died that same day. Watson now seems to have acknowledged that it could be misleading since the broadcast version ran like this: "I have been making this film for 11 years, but this time when Barbara urgently called at dawn I went immediately to Malcolm's bedside uncertain as to what I would find." Somehow I doubt that Mr Watson allowed the ITV press office to draft his original commentary, so he should perhaps accept that a good deal of the responsibility for the confusion lies with him.

To conclude from this that Malcolm and Barbara was a dishonest or negligible film would be a big leap, and a misplaced one too. Like many of Watson's documentaries, it had flaws - a certain moral grandstanding on the part of its maker, something a little avaricious about its appetite for emotional climax. But those flaws are inextricably bonded to its virtues - the long-burn engagement of the film-maker with his subject and a courage about the patience of viewers, their willingness to sit out a story that takes time to tell. And it seemed distinctly ironic that such a fuss should have arisen about precise moment of death when the central point of the film is that Alzheimer's cruelly smears death - and bereavement - across years and years. "I think the real Malcolm died a long time ago... and I'm just left with a shadow," said his wife, long before that final scene occurred. A little earlier - in one of the film's most wrenching sequences - she had temporarily put Malcolm into a care home, desperate for some respite from the ordeal of caring for him; as he wandered hunched and confused through the corridors an off-screen voice repeatedly shrieked "Please come! Please come!" - a cry that couldn't help but make you think of death as a rescuer, and a death certificate as a document of asylum.

Malcolm and Barbara could hardly do justice to the couple's long wait for release - compressing years of agony into less than 90 minutes of airtime. But it did convey many of the crueller realities of the disease, from the shreds of emotion and feeling that remain snagged in the disintegrating personality, to the strange dilemma of those who love them - determined to be loyal to a person who can't, in any meaningful sense, still be said to be present.

"Do you want to film the bitter end Paul?" Barbara asked at some point during her long vigil. He replied that he did, and it would be a very unforgiving critic who said that he'd failed, whenever the final breath was drawn.

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