In telling stories about people with disabilities meeting challenges, there is one constant peril: the dreaded “inspo” – short for “inspiration porn”. Real lives are complex and no one really wants to be served up as a public feel-good pill. In The Restaurant That Makes Mistakes, it’s the subjects themselves who do more than anyone else to keep it real.
The premise of the programme, based on an original British show, is to put a group of people living with dementia to work in a restaurant and live with what happens next. The question of work is vital for some of the volunteers; one, 56-year-old Dawn, went from being an experienced family-violence counsellor to the youngest resident of a rest home in just two years. Another, Cliff, was the managing director of a company and, “I loved my work.”
All of them grieve for who they once were. But all of them are earthy and funny about what confronts them.
“They’re very funny,” says Sam Blackley, who produced the show for Great Southern Television. “In advance of making the show, and indeed, all through the process of making it, the inspo thing was something I was terrified of.
“We could have fallen either way – one would have been inspo and the other, clearly, would be laughing at rather than laughing with.
“Either would have been a very unfortunate outcome. And thank god we had the people we did who made it both funny and moving just by virtue of who they were.”
It’s the restaurant professionals, chef Ben Bayly and his team at The Grounds in West Auckland, who seem anxious at the outset.
“Much like me, Ben had no idea how it was going to pan out,” says Blackley. “We didn’t know how effective the volunteers would be, how much information they could retain, whether there would be a progression as we went along or whether it would be starting afresh each day because they hadn’t retained information. So the nerves were legitimate.”
At one point in the first episode, Bayly talks about being with his grandmother through her progressive dementia and has to flee the camera in tears. Bayly’s “real, personal connection” to dementia emerged after the producers approached him, says Blackley.
“You didn’t get quite that sense with the UK version,” she says. “Ben found the whole process quite affecting and quite moving. He was quite legitimately in tears at various stages and that authentic response helped us enormously.”
By the end of the series, the volunteers, who were all recruited with the help of Dementia Auckland, are “legitimately” running things for themselves, says Blackley. It won’t all result, as the lauded British show did, in a working restaurant staffed by people with dementia, although one volunteer now has a job at The Grounds and Bayly has a plan to make the restaurant available for the others to cook for themselves on off nights.
The goal is to offer a sense of the purpose they’ve lost and to confront the stigma of dementia, even when that means taking a few risks. Such as, say, putting Mark, who has Lewy body dementia, visual-spatial disabilities and Parkinson’s tremors on that most threatening of kitchen aids, the mandoline.
“I know,” says Blackley laughing. “What could go wrong?”
The Restaurant That Makes Mistakes, TVNZ 1, Sunday, June 18, 8.30pm and streaming on TVNZ+
