It’s rare to see older men displaying their flaws on screen – it’s women who get all the scrutiny

No one really thinks about older men – they’re just there, aren’t they? In the background, being slightly annoying, holding the queue up in the supermarket, coming home with the “wrong tomatoes”.

No one writes articles about them – about how they feel, what they should wear and whether they should have their ear hair lasered, or their noses waxed. They don’t have any buzzwords to describe them – they’re not peri-menopausal, menopausal or post-menopausal, they’re just “older men”: not “old-old”, not shuffling ever closer to death; just older than we can really be bothered with.

Some might be retired, some are powerful and some never made it – but emotionally, they are a complete mystery.

This is why The Kominsky Method on Netflix TV is so weirdly groundbreaking. It’s not brand new, by the way – so if this is old news to you, I apologise. It premiered in 2018, but I only started to watching it last week, and it was a revelation. Here on my telly were two older men, Norman – played by Alan Arkin (born in 1934) – and Sandy – aka Michael Douglas (born in 1944) – displaying the kind of deep personal friendship normally reserved for female double acts.

Here were two messy screwed up blokes with vivid pasts and forty-something daughters, showing us what it’s like to be the kind of older man who isn’t ready for Velcro slippers. Who’d have thought that men in their seventies and beyond could be so complex and funny? Listen, I know the dialogue is written by a crack team of writers holed up somewhere in Los Angeles, but I think we need to realize that these kind of men exist in real life too.

I live with a septuagenarian – my partner is 72, and I don’t think he had ever seen anyone on screen being hilarious about living with an enlarged prostrate before. He was basically watching himself. In the TV show, Douglas plays Sandy Kominsky, an ageing actor who – in between visits to the bathroom – runs an acting school (hence the title of the show) with his grown-up daughter. Arkin plays his fabulously successful but recently widowed agent, who talks to his dead wife and has a hugely screwed up drink and drug-dependent daughter ricocheting in and out of rehab.

The set up of the comedy-drama is brilliant, but at the heart of its success is this genuinely charming and original “geriatric bromance”. The fact that these two guys may have been around the block a few times but are still blessed with laser-sharp wit and a world-weary cynicism is massively refreshing. They aren’t total jerks, they aren’t boring idiots, they are living, breathing, three-dimensional human beings with regrets, desires and a whole lot of life experiences.

Neither of them dress like old men either – hoorah, there must be something very depressing for blokes over the age of 70 to constantly see themselves depicted on TV as a load of non-threatening cardi wearing nincompoops, dressed mostly in stuff their wives see fit to buy them (by which I mean mostly John Lewis or Marks & Spencer).

Ahem, lets just remember that the great British designer Paul Smith is 74? I doubt he’s lolling around in a pair of beige slacks. And as for buying my partner’s clothes, there’s no way. He has always been better dressed than I am – and at his age, it’s become weirdly more noticeable. Often, when we go out together, young women will compliment him on his “look” – for example, last winter a certain black beret scored very highly on our Peckham Rye walks.

There is no male equivalent of “mutton dressed as lamb”, and in any case, in The Kominsky Method, these old boys know they’re old, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know what suits them. Michael Douglas is particularly keen on a natty hat, scarf and sunglasses combo – he is stylishly scruffy, whereas Arkin is all immaculate suits. Even when he has a bit of breakdown and is found wandering the streets, griefstricken in his dressing gown, the dressing gown is very smart.

Yes, they’re privileged white men, but they’re old – and old men are often ignored. As a woman in her sixties, I am constantly aware of my own sex and generation pushing back boundaries and expectations of what it is to age, particularly as a post-menopausal woman who refuses to conform to an expected more sensible and useful role. Ha! Not going to happen, however I’m not so aware of many male columnists discussing their attitudes to growing older. The subject just doesn’t seem to take up the same amount of column inches. But maybe I haven’t been looking in the right place?

As many of us find out sooner or later, ageing whether you’re a man or a woman isn’t for the weak of spirit, but it needn’t be boring or badly dressed either.

So, for those in need of a reminder that life doesn’t stop at 70, I can’t recommend The Kominsky Method more highly. It might even make you look at older men in a brand new light – you never know, some of them might even be as interesting as us?