Robert Chalmers doesn't like... Old people

They're everywhere. Nowadays, you just never know when you'll run into one. Previous generations, what with their fondness for absinthe, high-tar cigarettes and motoring without seatbelts (not to mention their gung-ho attitude towards unprotected sex and trench warfare, well before the advent of penicillin) had the decency to bow out early. The further you go back in history, through the ages of laudanum, duelling, smallpox and bubonic plague, the less prevalent is the tendency to senescence.

There's a wonderful picture by the great British photographer Colin Jones, taken on the Liverpool docks in the early 1960s. It shows workers waiting to be hired under the contemptible lump labour system. The crowd is identically dressed in overcoats and caps. The workers' expressions radiate gloom. Only one face is turned towards the camera, glowering defiance. The dockers all look about 60. Examine the image more closely, and you see that each figure is far younger, in the prime of life.

Take a similar crowd shot today, in some place where old people congregate – a Pink Floyd reunion concert, say – and you'd see the precise opposite: corpulent people of 70, dressing and cavorting much as they did in their teens.

That's their entitlement of course, and there's really nothing that bad about old people so long as you keep them away from certain things: reminiscence, electricity, dance-floors and so on. The main difficulty with today's older generation is their cunning exploitation of their status. It works like this. In the normal course of things, they flaunt the qualities they've acquired with age, notably experience and wisdom. (Whatever the subject – hairdressing, sexuality or Germany – one thing is constant: they know best. This belief springs from the first law of seniority, namely that Nothing Is Quite What It Was). Everything changes when they find themselves in a situation of difficulty. That's when they assume a demeanor of tremendous vulnerability, frail victims of a young, vigorous and hostile world.

This last tactic was attempted by Rupert Murdoch during his recent statement to the Culture, Media and Sports committee at Westminster. When outsmarted, this ruthlessly dominant global operator mutated into a dithering geriatric, seemingly bewildered by his sprightly junior inquisitors.

It's a tendency eloquently expounded upon by my friend, the Massachusetts-born comedian Doug Stanhope. "If old people are so smart," Stanhope asks, "how come they're always getting screwed by telemarketing fraud? 'Oh, they took advantage of us because we are old. They told us that we'd won a brand-new Mercedes, and that all we had to do was to leave $8,000 in a brown paper bag in a locker at the bus station. We were sceptical at first, because we've been burned like this 11 or 12 times before. But they did it to us because we're old.' No. It's because you're dumb as a stick and you always have been."

Death comes to us all, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. What would Jimi Hendrix be doing if he was alive today, at 68? I'll tell you. He'd be making tedious new-age soundtrack albums – his work was already heading that way – and appearing in afternoon TV commercials for hearing aids.

Is there anything worse than old people? Well, yes, actually. (See next week's column on "Young People"). And of course there are some veterans to whom none of the above could ever be applied – people like Shirley Maclaine, Gore Vidal and Bob Dylan.

It should also be recognized that nobody can satirise the elderly quite so effectively as they do themselves. Unlike the young, they have an extraordinary gift for irony at their own expense.

If you've recently seen Ken Dodd (81) on tour, you'll have noticed his most brilliant material deals with subjects such as dementia. At one point he describes finding himself standing, naked and confused, with one foot on the bathroom floor and one in the tub. "So I called downstairs to my brother. I shouted, 'Billy, was I getting into the bath, or was I getting out of the bath? Come up." I hear footsteps, then silence.

Eventually a voice shouts, 'Ken?'

'Yes?'

'Was I coming up the stairs, or was I going down the stairs?' "

Naturally, being old, Dodd won't concede this new material, like his stunning, ever-evolving improvisational ability, is now his greatest asset. He's nostalgic for the days of spectacular costumes, outrageous props and long chorus lines. And yet not so long ago, appearing on a TV chat show, he casually delivered a beautifully poignant and insightful aside on the subject of ageing.

"Never talk about the good old days," he told the interviewer. "Never. Because these are the good days: now, when you are alive, and warm, and breathing."