What was cocooning really like for the older generation? A new TV documentary sheds some light

IT was a word that summed up Ireland’s safety first attitude to Covid-19, and it was a word that many of the older generation came to loathe in the past 18 months: Cocooned.

Now a new documentary by acclaimed director Ken Wardrop provides an insight into what it was like for those people who shut themselves away from the world.

Called Cocooned, it airs on RTÉ1 on Monday at 9.35pm, and promises to be a creative, often irreverent programme, exploring our older generation’s reaction to being confined during the various stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

Filmed from March, 2020, to January, 2021, it introduces us to some extraordinary men and women – characters with real life experience to last the course of being ‘cocooned’.

This is a story that celebrates the resilience and bravery of our older generation and that honours their acceptance and grit in the face of adversity.

It is also Wardrop’s personal reaction to the Covid-19 crisis. His mum Ethel resides in a nursing home, and both he and his family experienced first hand the often complicated and sad times associated with lockdown restrictions. However, Ken always tried to find the light in the darkest of times.

Photographed primarily at night through peoples’ windows while conversations are recorded on telephones, Cocooned exquisitely showcases the calm eeriness of the national lockdowns.