‘We don’t like to talk about Pru’s dementia much – we just manage’

At the home he shares with Prunella Scales, his wife of 60 years, the actor tells Louise Carpenter about the realities of their evolving relationship

C‘I hate the idea that life is going on around me, but that so much of it is closed off’

‘We haven’t pushed it under the carpet. You don’t start living in a different way’

artoons published in Punch cover an entire wall of Timothy West’s conservatory, tributes to his long acting career, from Shakespeare to EastEnders. In one, he is sneezing for Chekhov – rotund, eyes narrowed, nose long, white curls sprouting like clouds. Today, at 89, he would be caricatured sitting by the Christmas tree, sinking his teeth into a mince pie, reaching for a whisky. Tradition is important to West; decorating the tree in the drawing room, listening to carols, “feeling grateful for every day, for yet another precious year with Pru”, his assistant Tania explains.

West has shared this house overlooking Wandsworth Common with Prunella Scales, now 91, (best known for playing Sybil from 1975 to 1979 in Fawlty Towers) for almost the duration of their 60-year marriage. They met in 1961 after they were cast together in BBC play She Died Young, and became friends doing the crossword together, eating Polo mints and making each other laugh. Both had acting parents (his father, Lockwood, and her mother, Catherine, who dropped out of Rada but became a permanent member of the Liverpool Repertory Company). West was unhappily married to his first wife with whom he had a daughter, Juliet, now 66. Scales felt deep guilt, but West divorced (citing his own adultery) and they married on October 26 1963 at Chelsea Register Office (West had proposed as they sat at traffic lights outside Brighton).

The night before last, they had a postponed drinks party to celebrate their diamond wedding. In 2003, on their 40th wedding anniversary, they renewed their marriage vows at a village church near Chichester, watched by their children and grandchildren: Juliet, their eldest son, actor Samuel West, 57, who shares two girls, playwright aged six Laura and Wade, nine, with and their younger son Joe, 54, a writer and translator who lives with his wife and family in France and has two sons, aged 27 and 25, and a daughter aged 17. There are now four greatgrandchildren too.

Theirs is a love story, once the private life of “two jobbing actors”, as West puts it, but now very public, following the unexpected success of Great Canal Journeys, a Channel 4 show they fronted for five years from 2014, attracting over two million viewers. It has captured them sailing around the waterways of Britain – and then way beyond to countries such as India, Vietnam and Cambodia – on narrow boats and barges.

As a result of the series’ authentic charm, they became known to the public simply as “Tim and Pru”, which, West says, “is what we are today in real life”. What elevated the filming from the usual actors-on-a-jolly was their genuine passion for narrow boats (they still have the one they commissioned and launched in 1988) and West’s honesty from the start that Pru had, a year before in 2013, been officially diagnosed with vascular dementia (after a decade of largely ignorable symptoms such as forgetfulness and not retaining her lines).

The question arose, “Are we going to tell our viewers about this?” West explains to me of the decision to start the show, “because Pru is going to behave in an unusual way [sometimes]. And the answer was yes, but not in a way that means they are going to be worried by it.”

Far from alarming a TV audience, the public fell in love with them, tuning in to see their journeying in the face of what West referred to on screen as Pru’s “condition”, which would eventually end the show on West’s 85th birthday in October 2019, because it had become too difficult. The final compilation special, in which West said “goodbye”, had the most hardened of TV critics weeping.

We are having coffee in the drawing room, where West has set up the Christmas tree by the window. It is the week leading up to Christmas. The room is exquisitely wallpapered. There are bookcases on every available wall, framed prints, velvet chairs, a baby grand piano rescued years ago from the set of a play. West, who has played King Lear four times, was a star in

Brass and, more recently, has been in EastEnders, Coronation Street and Gentleman Jack, is not a pianist but he and Pru adore music. Thousands of classical CDs are stacked in bookcases behind the piano. The books and music are his coping mechanism at home, and company and social engagements beyond the front door. It was Scales herself who wrote six years ago, in that same foreword, of her failure to retain any experience that “music is different [from the theatre], I can come away spellbound, with neither of us needing to talk about what we’ve heard”.

Two years earlier, in a foreword of the book of the series, Our Great Canal Journeys (2017), Scales had written: “How do I feel about being in this situation? Well, angry of course. I hate the idea that the world is going on around me, but that so much of it is closed off. I soon forget my anger, though, as I forget nearly everything else. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

Earlier this year, when the Dementia UK website paid tribute to West’s memoir Pru & Me, published on the back of their newfound TV popularity, messages of thanks flew in from the public: “I think we might have helped one or two people, yes,” West says, with what emerges to be an instinct for pathological understatement.

“Nowadays people know immediately if they feel a loved one might be touched by dementia. Back then [early 2000s] people didn’t talk about it that much.

“Every situation is different, so it’s not helpful to ask people for advice. Also, we don’t like to talk about it very much, so that it doesn’t dominate. The answer to the question ‘How do you cope?’ is ‘We manage.’”

The Tim/Pru approach to Christmas is, essentially, a blueprint for the rest of the year: business as usual. They can afford a lot of help, which puts them among the very lucky. There is Sue, Pru’s live-in carer (or Pru’s “assistant”), who rotates with two others every six weeks and is responsible for cooking and looking after Pru. (Sue later tells me, almost welling up, “In all my career, I have never seen a couple of their age who are still so in love.”)

There is Luke, a regular visitor with whom Pru plays chess for her cognitive function; Tim still plays with her weekly. There is Tania, Tim’s assistant who works on their diary, booking theatre trips and concerts, which they attend together, even though Pru now has no memory recall. There is a gardener too, helping Pru maintain what was once her life’s passion (after acting), and there is a cleaner. There is a tangible feeling of order, of everything being looked after and in control. With all this in place, when family visits it can be social.

As usual, this year, says Tania, “they are keeping it old-school. They’ve done a few Christmases together now so they have got it down to a fine art.” They have learnt how to manage expectations. For West, it’s not about what Pru is missing, or what he is missing with her, it’s about the fact they are still able to be together, in their own home.

West wrote the Christmas cards and sent them out “in their hundreds”; Pru wrapped the family gifts with ribbon; the Christmas wreath went on the front door 10 days before Christmas Day; they have been driven to various carol services in the run-up to this weekend; Christmas Eve will be with

Sam and his family; Christmas Day will be on their own, lunch cooked by Sue and eaten on the table set for two in the conservatory overlooking the garden.

Boxing Day will be spent with Juliet and their grandson, Ben. There will be lunchtime drinks and then a nap, and Pru’s love of the TV news.

Pru is currently recording her parts of Pru & Me for the audio book – her love letters, often very funny, to West dating back to their early marriage. She still has the distinctive voice, gravelly, deep and posh; the product of an actress of a certain generation. Born in Surrey, she was classically trained at the Old Vic Theatre school, despite A-levels good enough to get her to Oxbridge. By the 1960s, she was starring opposite Richard Briers in

The Marriage Lines, one of the most popular sitcoms, and touring the world with various repertory companies. She has acted with Peter Sellers, Peter Ustinov, and was still on stage at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket at 71, in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, albeit needing prompters by then, due to the dementia. West’s start was rather less classical: born in Bradford and raised in Bristol, he was a salesman for an office furniture company before he started to make a good living on the stage, and then in various television dramas too.

Pru’s dementia has waged a slow march over two decades. When symptoms waned on and off between 2003 and 2013, West admits that he thought, hopefully and misguidedly, that it might have gone. Dementia is unpredictable in its progress. Their great friend, the late Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers, was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2012 and died in 2016: “I still miss him,” West writes in Pru & Me.

Recently, there has been a very pronounced deterioration in Pru’s hearing, which hearing aids have been unable to help. “It has become appalling,” West explains. “We’ve tried everything but nothing works. We manage, but somehow you have to shout to impinge.”

Pru joins us in the drawing room, open and warm, delighted by the prospect of company. “More coffee?” she asks. “Time for a drink?” It’s 11.30am but it’s Christmas and, anyway, does it count when you are 91? By midday, West is holding a whisky, to be followed by a glass of wine with lunch and then a nap for Pru.

“Can I get you anything?” she says again. “More coffee? A biscuit?”

It’s no surprise that her comic ear earned her a champion in Alan Bennett, who cast her in Doris and Doreen, A Question of Attribution and An Englishman Abroad, and made her John Cleese’s first and only choice as Sybil. On separate occasions, both Peter Sellers and John Betjeman fell under her spell. Sellers deluged her with dinner invites during filming at Pinewood, six months into her relationship with West. Betjeman chose her to join him on stage in 1970 for a BBC recording of An Evening with Sir John Betjeman, a recital of poetry and prose – which made West a bit jealous, as much as he liked Betjeman.

Scales is exceptionally stylish: sandy hair immaculately coiffured, wearing fashionable jeans, trainers and a green and white pinstriped shirt. She is also extremely young-looking, if a bit more fragile than when on the canals, but still physically healthy.

Her deafness is inescapable. She shouts “WHAT, MY LOVE?” after every inquiry. West is sometimes visibly exhausted by this. He spells out words. “S T Y L I S H,” he shouts. “WHAT, MY LOVE?”

Her hearing aids are called “her ears”, as in “Have you put your ears in?” But it’s no use.

Their son Joe noticed in 2006, five years after West saw she wasn’t fully in character on stage, that Pru had become fixated on things, and upset by them. There has never been any anger or emotional outbursts, more the returning over and over to the number of napkins on the table, or going back and forth to the dishwasher throughout the meal, “which appeared to act as a kind of security blanket”, explains West in Pru & Me.

Today, Pru is taken by my ears: “When did you get those extra holes in your ears done?” she asks. And then later “How did you have the courage to have so many holes in your ears?” (Good question.)

“Pru,” says West, “can we just get back to talking about one thing?” “SORRY?”

“Can we just talk about one thing?” “WHAT DID HE SAY?” she asks me. “Pru, we’re talking about dementia.” “ABOUT NATURE?” “Dementia! D E M E N T I A!” “WHAT? Dementia? Well, we’ve all got that up to a point, haven’t we?”

It feels as though Pru is having fun with this conversation. “Have you got it?” she asks me. “Not yet.” I say. “Pru!” West remonstrates. “She’s young!”

“Well, I’ve always had dementia! Since I was a little girl.”

When I tell her how young she looks, she quickly retorts, “Money in the bank! If I can get the parts, I hope to go on earning until I flop.”

She was absolutely determined to work and tour with young children and a nanny – pretty much unheard of in the 1960s, when mothers were expected to give up their careers and stay at home. Her own mother had given up acting to become a Surrey housewife, but she was not prepared to make this sacrifice: “What with being a wife and a housewife, acting was the only decent thing I had to do!”

Favourite female actor? She looks over to West.

“Don’t keep looking at me for the answer!” he says.

“I ask his advice on everything,” she says. “He’s better than me… on the whole. I’m jealous if they’ve got wonderful faces.”

Gielgud was her favourite man “but he was gay and I didn’t really realise that for many, many years!”

Time no longer exists for Scales, so that every time she greets West it is as though they are being reunited after a long spell on tour.

“We haven’t pushed it under the carpet,” says West of the dementia. “It doesn’t mean life stops. You don’t live in a different way. Pru loves people. She will start talking about something quite other, but it will have to do.”

West is at his fullest on his personal loss in Pru & Me. “The truth is that I miss her companionship; the companionship of my best friend.

I miss going to see a play or concert with her and being able to talk about it afterwards. What I miss most of all, I think, is us no longer being able to share our hopes and fears with one another.”

It takes a while before I am brave enough to bring up the future, so uncertain with all dementia patients, not wanting to pain West or, for that matter, Scales, should her “ears” tune in. When we talk about West’s broadly good health, she puts her hands together as if thanking God and says “Merci et adieu.”

“Pru won’t be moving to a home,” says West, “we will always stay here. I don’t want to move somewhere else. I don’t mind somebody here to make things easier for us.”

“Time for a drink?” Pru asks again. West hits the whisky, smiling wolfishly at the notion of tiresome journalists.

‘Will you tell the Telegraph readers that we’re raging socialists?” Pru asks. Yes, I will tell them, I confirm. But I suspect they will love you regardless. Who wouldn’t?