It’s the most surprising and delightful arts story of the year. The Zimmers, a pop group with a 90-year-old lead singer, an 83-year-old guitarist and a backing chorus of 40 pensioners (including two aged 99 and 100), has soared up the charts with a version of (what else?) My Generation – The Who’s classic song, with its suddenly very ironic line: “Hope I die before I get old”. The band’s combined age is 3,000 years – almost as much as the Rolling Stones. Their video on YouTube has been seen two million times. Last night they appeared on Jay Leno’s Tonight, the primetime US chat-show. And all this has been achieved in the teeth of appalling ageism from the main British pop radio stations, Radio 1 and Capital 95.8, both of which refused to play the single.

My press colleagues have not exactly been paragons of open-mindedness, either. “The band that puts the hip into hip replacement,” chortled one. “Will their next song be When I’m 164?” quipped another.

Of course, for somebody in my middling years, the rise of the Zimmers is deeply reassuring. Since the pop-music world can now be said to boast aficionados who are a century old, I can claim that I am at the younger end of the spectrum. Well, almost. But it’s not for that reason that I applaud their success. It’s because of what they stand for.

They were brought together, from lonely council flats and run-down old people’s homes, by the BBC reporter Tim Samuels for a programme on the plight of the elderly. His thesis, and it can’t be denied, is that old people are the forgotten and insulted underclass of our age. Most of us accept that as we grow old our physical and mental powers will wane. But what perhaps we don’t realise (despite vociferous campaigns by pensioners’ lobby-groups such as IsItFair, the “blue-rinse panthers”) is how shoddily we will be treated by society – how much we will be shunted out of sight and mind.

I had a taste of that a few years ago when a stupid cycling accident landed me in hospital for ten days while the innards of my leg were pinned together with the titanium equivalent of flying buttresses. In my NHS ward were several very old men. At night they moaned. Nobody took any notice. The ward seemed like a prison. In the far distance through the windows one could see the world carrying on blithely and successfully without us – indeed, oblivious to our continued existence. It was impossible not to feel involuntarily cast adrift. And with that realisation came a gnawing loneliness.

I felt all these things, yet I knew that I would be out within a fortnight. The old men, I suspected, would never get out – or, if they did, they would just exchange one solitary confinement for another.

Of course I realise that only a minority of “third-agers” endure existences as bad as that. Blessed with reasonable health and at least a semblance of a pension, many people manage to lead happy, busy lives into their nineties. But there are hundreds of thousands for whom old age is not the serene crowning of their mortal span, but a scarcely endurable curse. And as medicine keeps more and more of us alive for longer and longer (the world, I’m told, will soon have a billion pensioners), so the problem of how to make old people feel wanted, useful and fully integrated into society will grow.

One objection to old people’s homes, as the ongoing police investigation in Somerset reminds us, is the alarming variation in the quality of the carers they employ. I hear stories of terrifying callousness, of dignity-stripping neglect bordering on sadism, as well as of selfless saintliness. But another objection (which also applies to those leisure organisations targeted at the elderly) is that they can easily increase, rather than diminish, the sense of isolation – the feeling of being cocooned in a geriatric ghetto.

Mind you, I don’t think the elderly always help themselves. My heart sinks whenever I hear someone say that they are retiring “to the country”. Enticed by pretty scenery, they are uprooting themselves not just from the physical and social landscape they have known all their lives, but from friends and family – the very people who could ease them through their declining years. So the strain on social services grows and grows.

Somehow we have to figure out ways of bringing together young, middle-aged and elderly to the mutual enrichment of all. When I’m not feeding the hungry presses, I feed my soul by participating in a choir where the age-range spans 80 years. I won’t pretend that the musical results are as pristine as if the group were confined to an elite platoon of brilliant twentysomethings who all sang like nightingales and could count to four. But the sense of team-spirit across the generations is often exhilarating. The trouble is that in the “real world” outside I rarely find anything like that.

Now, though, we have the example of the Zimmers, aurally blitzing our condescending preconceptions about what old people can and cannot do. Have a listen to their performance, if you can. It’s a lot livelier than some of what will be on parade at Glastonbury this month. What were Yeats’s wise words? “An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick – unless soul clap its hands and sing.” In 30 years of writing about the arts I can’t recall a more joyous instance of that happening.

Girls, pearls and a spot of art history

For the purest research reasons I have been scrutinising “girls in pearls”: the delightful daughters of the landed gentry (or those aspiring to this condition) who are featured as frontispieces in the magazine Country Life, presumably to attract rich, marriageable aristocrats. It’s strange how many seem to be “reading history of art”, usually at St Andrews University or (for the less “bookish” lass) an institution called “Oxford Brookes”. But these herculean labours of scholarship seem to leave time for the following: designing their own range of accessories; modelling in charity fashion shows; riding ponies; and of course eradicating poverty in Africa.

I have a personal interest in this, since my own daughter is “reading history of art”, though admittedly at egalitarian Manchester University rather than royally-appointed St Andrews. Does this mean that she is about to marry a viscount? And if so, how much cocaine should I get in for the reception?

Get stuffed day?

On the radio yesterday I heard a bossy government minister – name escaped me, but they are all the same anyway – telling us that we are going to have one of our bank holidays designated as “National British Day”. It will be marked by celebrations which, he said, “should be organised by local communities”.

Should? Should? In Tony Hancock’s immortal words: “What about Magna Carta? Did she die in vain?” One of the quintessential things about being British is, or used to be, that we don’t take orders about how to run our lives. The most British thing that a local community could do on “National British Day” would be to tell the Government to get stuffed.

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