It has become fashionable to badmouth public television, of late. Just about everyone I know resents the incessant fundraising and aggressive tactics used to get more money. At least one friend has announced that she has stopped giving to our Boston channel altogether.

Such critics ignore, however, the marvelous programs that continue to appear. Two of them related to aging caught my attention recently. They each delivered images that, in the days after their showing,  have continued to nourish my soul.

The first was a Masterpiece Theater drama “Lost For Words” written by Derec Longden and based on his own experience. It stars two fine British actors, Dame Thora Hird and Pete Postlewaite who play an aged woman in serious decline and her adult son.

When we first meet the mother in flashback, her life is still active. In fact, she then enjoys greater freedom than earlier when her oppressive husband was alive. “I’ve been very happy since he died,” she confesses. “It took me a long time to be able to say that.”

At this stage, she feels lighthearted enough to reply impishly to a question put to her by her son. “Mum, do you want to be buried or cremated? he asks. “I don’t know,” she responds, “surprise me.”

Later, hit with two strokes, the mother eventually has to leave her home and be placed in a residence for the elderly.

The sign of her mental deterioration comes when she imagines seeing “little devils” around her house. To block their entrance, she stops up the faucets and other outlets. “I’m daft, aren’t I?” she asks her son who comforts her with great patience and sensitivity.

Soon she starts calling her son by his father’s name, “Jesse” instead of “Deric.” Her face displays the confusion and terror felt by people who go through this bewildering experience; his face is full of compassion and support.

I asked my friend and next door neighbor George Hein why he so strongly recommended my viewing this drama. “It was so sensitively done,” he replied. “It was spectacularly unromantic. It did not pretend that dealing with your parents in old age is either easy or satisfying. For those who have been through it, or are going to go through it, it’s very revealing.”

My friend George also admired the way the son stuck with it, never complaining because he had to drive eighty miles to where his mother lived.  The son’s wife, with whom he shares a deeply affectionate marriage, is blind. Though she cannot do much to help her mother-in-law, she shows herself always supportive of Deric’s efforts.

Prejudice against the old and weak emerges when Deric takes his mother to a nursery where one of the attendants tells him: “You ought to keep her on a bloody lead.” This comes as a shocking contrast with the way he treats his mother consistently.

Near the end of the drama, Deric finds the right residence for his mother. We see one of the aides there admiring a photo of the old woman as she looked when young. Then the television camera focuses on Deric’s hand enfolding his mother’s, a sign of his persevering love for her.

The second episode that moved me was an interview with the great French mime Marcel Marceau, shown on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. This famous performer was born Marcel Mangel in 1923 to a Jewish family in Strasbourg. His father was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and never seen again.

We see him in the role of Bif, the comic character he created in 1947. In another role viewers see him struggling to take off the laughing mask in an episode that reveals “the solitude of man.”

The first shock that comes with the interview is to hear Marceau talk at all. He speaks fluent English though he accompanies his speech with constant use of his dramatic hands and marvelous facial expressions. What a lithe body he has at age 76, with his frizzy hair, supple limbs, and eyes full of light!

“Is your art metaphysical?” asks interviewer Elizabeth Farnsworth. “Absolutely,” he relies, “I like to reveal the essence of our soul, the inside of ourselves.”  He believes in “the stream of silence” and tries to bring complete silence to theaters where he performs.

He does not like to call himself religious but “when I do the creation of the world, God is in me.”  What difference has age made to his art, Farnsworth perceptively inquires. “Age has helped me to go deeper. I think that with age I cover more of the experience of my life.”

Asked finally about his legacy, this dynamic artist focuses on the language of gesture. “What is important is understanding why the gesture is there: not one word, not one gesture too much.” He feels gratified that mime has now been accepted as an universal language now and that it has become part of American culture.

Richard Griffin