in the department of gerontology , I believe Pope could be a positive force for good, bringing back a much needed sense of how it is.

Pope Lonergan’s book I’ll Die After Bingo, about the comedian’s years working in elderly care, is being developed for TV.He has a wonderful turn of phrase, both serious and comic, realising that gallows humour is an essential release-valve in a demanding job witnessing decay and detachment.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He would lose physical control and even likens the morning after a group binge to dementia, with ‘people you don’t properly recognise talking at you while the rest of the bodies in the room seem unreasonable tranquil and refuse to acknowledge you if you speak. This book is brilliant - an amazing mix of dedication, empathy, laughs-out-loud and outrage about how the current government has abandoned the care system for elderly people to hedge funders and others who just want to make money out of the vulnerable.These characters provide much of the entertainment and humour of the book – as with the title quote, in which an elderly lady decides to postpone her death until after bingo has finished – but crucially, Lonergan portrays his subjects without caricature or cliché. Hats off to the author Pope Lonergan for his incisive and witty commentaries about a broken system of aged care, with the carers being the lowest form of life. All the events of the book take place before Lockdown when the plight of care homes was brought more to the fore on the news, since which time everything seems to have been forgotten again, dropped from our collective conscience. I appreciate Covid came after he had left but it seems a little odd for a book about the care sector to be published in 2022 and not reference it at all.

I'll Die After Bingo is his tough yet hilarious, intelligent and honest account of 9 ½ years spent caring for the elderly.It's subtitled as a story of a decade as a Care Home Assistant but it seems to be stuck in this really disjointed state of being part academic and part memoir.