TELEVISION / Failing memory

EVERY NOW and then in Black Daisies for the Bride (BBC 2), Tony Harrison and Peter Symes's film about three women suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, the sound- track rose into a humming discordant whine. It was, as an earlier image had revealed, the noise of an electric hospital trolley labouring up the incline of a long, sloping corridor, but it had been modulated for the film into a howling roar, the sound of the blizzard which was Harrison's recurrent image for the obliterating force of the disease. As it raged, drifts of confetti fluttered across the screen, a multicoloured snowfall which slowly obscured the objects it fell on, just as the patients' shredded memories excluded all coherent recollection.

The opening moments were very bleak indeed - an abrupt, unsparing introduction to the cracked- record repetitions Alzheimer's forces on its victims. One woman repeated 'I love you' again and again, the words uttered with a blank urgency, as though it was a message we had failed to hear the first time. Another obsessively cleaned the ward, rubbing her fingers over the surfaces for imaginary dust. Yet another, by some cruel trick of the synapses, told an animated anecdote - her expressions and intonations perfectly traced the contours of an inward recollection but the words were a tumbling rubble of shattered memory.

To restore some dignity to these sad figures, Harrison (whose father- in-law died of the disease) had resurrected their younger selves and set the story of their lives to popular tunes (which are often the last thing to be erased by the disease). This time, at least, that over-used Radio Times adjective 'unique' was entirely justified. But, as moving and inventive as the film was, there were too many points at which you felt uncomfortable in ways that went against the grain of the film's sympathies, even a slight sense that Harrison's honest, meticulous verse, which made his previous pieces for television so compelling, had failed before this spectacle.

The problem with putting words into other people's mouths is that they don't always fit very comfortably there. It happened here on two levels: first with the awkward delivery from staff members called on to speak rhyming lines and, more disturbingly, with the lines given to the women's young doubles. 'Not much memory left, soon even less'll survive,' sang one actress to a belting show-tune. 'With Alzheimer's treading all remembered time / The blizzard's blowing but godammit I'm / G. Gl. Gla. Glad I'm still Kath and alive.'

How can you know, you wondered, and what right have you to render this woman's dissolution as a queasy piece of Broadway resilience? These women did have a continuing life, in the memories of those who still loved them, but even those voices were pushed aside by Harrison's lines, heard only as fragmentary additions to the sound- track. What you really wanted here was just one voice - Harrison's, that powerful, reflective beat that can drive through moral confusion like a bulldozer through tangled undergrowth. Not this unhappy attempt at ventriloquism . . . not this edgy feeling that the women were props in a production entirely outside their comprehension.