Dickie Bird: Thinking yourself younger

What set of circumstances might bring together a feisty New York psychology professor and the world's most famous retired cricket umpire and son of Barnsley, Dickie Bird?

Professor Ellen Langer of Harvard University has spent decades investigating the ageing process and the part the mind plays in speeding up, or more importantly slowing down, the descent of the elderly into decrepitude.

Last month she came over here to test her methods on Dickie Bird. The 77-year-old was one of six celebrities in their later years who earlier this summer agreed to be in a television reality show with a difference. The reality they were asked to deal with was the world of the 1970s. The group was locked up for 10 days, given no access to what was happening on the outside and asked to pretend their lives still lay ahead of them.

In this case, the Big Brother House was a large pile in Buckinghamshire specially furnished to appear as if it was 1975 all over again. In effect it was a time machine whose promptings and associations propelled Dickie and the five others back to their salad days.

Dickie concedes he was at a low ebb when he was approached to participate. "It's been one thing after another in the past 17 months. I've had a stroke, I needed a new knee and I've had a pacemaker inserted for my heart. The stroke led me to lose confidence in meeting people. I used to wake up in the morning and I didn't want to meet people, or go out."

The germ of the idea for the show took root 30 years ago in the form of an experiment devised by Prof Langer. It took her down a route of inquiry which her research has continued to follow ever since. Last year she published an intriguing book called Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.

In it she argues that our deference to doctors' opinions, readiness to accept diagnoses unthinkingly – even the way we talk about our illnesses – can have an impact on our physical well-being. In short, her work is all about what can happen if we seriously question life's only certainty (apart from death and taxes) which is growing old.

In 1981, Prof Langer took two groups of men aged between 70 and 80 to a former rural monastery in New Hampshire where everything was set up to appear as if it were 1959. The door was closed on the present day. Fifties magazines and newspapers were the sole reading material. Period recall was prompted by a black-and-white television and a vintage radio playing old shows.

The first group stayed here a week and were asked to pretend they were young bucks living their 1950s experiences all over again. The second group, who came the following week, were asked to live in the present and to reminisce about the Fifties.

Before and after the experiment, the men took mental and physical tests. After a week away, they were all found to have become stronger and more flexible. Height, weight, movement, posture, hearing and vision improved and so did their performance on intelligence tests. Their joints were more flexible, their shoulders straighter, their fingers less stiff. But it was the group who had pretended that they were re-living 1959 which outdid the other.

The notion that the elixir of youth may lie in the workings of your own brain is a potent one. Who is not interested in possessing the power to think yourself younger? Hollywood certainly is. According to some sources, the New Hampshire experiment is set to become a feature film called Counter Clockwise with Jennifer Aniston playing Prof Langer. But details about this are sketchy.

The BBC has beaten them to it with their screen project which, according to the press release, promises "an extraordinary experiment which will change how people see ageing for ever". The show's title is maybe somewhat misleading, especially for oldies who associate The Young Ones with Cliff Richard, or possibly Ric Mayall, Ade Edmondson and Nigel Planer.

It was an original idea to send Dickie Bird back up memory lane with Liz Smith (Grandma from The Royle Family), dancer Lionel Blair, news reader Kenneth Kendall, newspaper editor Derek Jameson and film star Sylvia Syms. It was an even better idea to have them travel to their country retreat in vintage cars with songs from the summer of 1975 drifting from the car radios.

On entering the house they find a familiar Seventies interior from carpets and wallpapers to food packaging and vinyl LPs. Their bedrooms are exact replicas of their own, down to the colour of the bedspread and the trinkets on their dressers. They put on period clothes, read Seventies newspapers, talk as if they are living in 1975 and have clunky old video games to play. For a sports fanatic like Dickie, however, games were the downside to the experiment.

"We were locked away from the outside world so we had no idea who was winning Wimbledon, or who won the World Cup. We had no newspapers, only those from the 1970s, no TV, only old films." So what did they do with themselves? "We had discussions. About the 1970s and that era."

They were allowed out-of-doors for a spot of gardening and mowing the lawns, but not permitted to leave the premises. While the others had to stay put for the duration, an exception was made for Dickie. The reason was for him to experience again a cricket match which was one of the pinnacles of his career.

"I remember 1975 because that was when I umpired the first World Cup final when the West Indies played the Australians at Lord's. They took me back to Lord's in a car. I walked down from the umpires' room and through the Long Room and out into the middle. The idea was for me to relive those moments. The only person I was allowed to speak to was the head groundsman."

Before entering the 1970s house, the group underwent a battery of tests at Westminster University Hospital. Prof Langer was involved. "She came over specially. We had tests for walking, strength, blood pressure and puzzles on the computer. There was also a professor from the Northern General at Sheffield who was very good. At the end of the 10 days they judged how you had improved."

What was the day-to-day routine inside? "Suits were worn and dinner jackets in the evening. We had to cook for ourselves. Sylvia Syms did most of it although we had to get our own breakfasts.

"We had things to watch from that time like Fawlty Towers. And we watched Sylvia Syms in Ice-Cold in Alex (this Second World War drama where she plays a nurse crossing the North Africa desert in an ambulance was made in 1958, but it was still popular with television audiences in the 1970s).

"We did get restless, all cooped up. We'd no idea about what was going on in the real world. Hadn't a clue. We had one of those old fashioned record players that played LPs, stuff from that time. I can't remember what it was.

"There were one or two disagreements. Lionel Blair – all he did was talk about himself. We had to tell him at the end. That didn't go down too well.

"Derek Jameson got cross with him. Kenneth Kendall, a very nice chap, said to him, 'Tell me, Lionel, have you ever umpired a World Cup final?' The biggest improvement was in Liz Smith. Liz was the oldest in the group – she's about 84. She was on sticks when she went in and she walked away without them. I saw a tremendous improvement in that lady.

"Sylvia Syms was the youngest at 76. She made some good meals, too. I liked the chicken she made but I missed Yorkshire pudding with onion gravy.

"She can't do that. But she kept us going. If it had been left to us, we'd have lived on Cornflakes and beans on toast."

The experiment complete, the doctors and film-makers followed Dickie back to Barnsley.

"They came up to interview me about how I live now. Afterwards they got four friends of mine and we all went for a pub meal at the the Three Acres at Emley.

"They were asked if they could see a difference in me and they said they could. They said I was looking better than when I went in the house.

"I know my memory, even for a 77-year-old, was terrible. Now I'm sharper in my mind and I've got my confidence back.

"I'm glad I went. I'm glad I did it. I can feel it's done something. It's certainly interesting that having this sort of experience can improve you.

"Perhaps they should have it on the National Health."

Presented by Mariella Frostrup, The Young Ones begins on September 14 on BBC1.

YP MAG 4/9/10