The Zimmers
June 5th, 2007“Despite the light-hearted song and video, the idea for The Zimmers came from a hard-hitting BBC2 documentary called Power to the People, about elderly people standing up for themselves.”
Where it began:
“It all started with a project by BBC documentary maker Tim Samuels. ‘I set out to make a programme exploring how we treat old people in this country,’ he says. ‘So many are dumped in homes, stuck on their own, brushed under the carpet and marginalised. If you can judge a society by how well it looks after its old people, I always suspected we’d be in trouble.’
“He was right. He visited care homes that were often shabby, and occasionally grossly negligent. He found residents left to stagnate, slumped like zombies in front of blaring daytime telly, and denied crucial medical supervision.”
And now they’re celebs!
Pensioners talkin’ ’bout their generation
A Widley couple are part of the 40-strong group The Zimmers who have re-recorded My Generation, and the video has already taken cyberspace by storm, with an estimated 10m people logging on to see it on sites such as Myspace and YouTube.
Read The Daily Mail and see photo. To track the story through two of the members, John and Dorothy Tree, see The Portsmouth News.
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