The Songaminute Man

June 25, 2018
In 2016, Ted McDermott, an aging British crooner suffering from Alzheimer’s, became an international sensation after the videos of him singing to his son posted on the internet went viral. Here, his son, Simon, a journalist, tells his father’s story in loving detail—from Ted’s working-class upbringing in a British factory town to his life as a traveling singer who never quite made it big. Though
an endearing showman on stage, Ted wasn’t always easy to live with, and after he started to show signs of Alzheimer’s, he began lashing out at his wife and son, a gay man with whom Ted had a strong but combative relationship. Simon describes the physical and emotional toll it takes to care for someone with a disease they don’t know they have (“Although part of me knew Dad would forget who I was most of the time, he’d never spoken to me directly like this as though I was a stranger”). Through the videos of his dad riding in Simon’s car singing (something Simon did to calm his dad’s aggression), Simon caught glimpses of his father’s true self and created a bond with his dad he hadn’t shared since childhood. Ted’s YouTube popularity, as McDermott explains, helped other families dealing with Alzheimer’s and provided much needed exposure to a disease that many don’t understand. This is a wonderfully uplifting narrative of a son bonding with his aging father.