John Suchet received one of British television’s highest accolades in 2008: the Royal Television Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Few would have disputed the decision.
Whether reporting from overseas or presenting from the studio—mostly for ITN and, later, 5 News—John spent decades as a trusted voice of authority. Calm and composed, he delivered news and analysis on whatever crisis had unfolded around the world that day.
Yet the timeline reveals something remarkable. Just two years earlier, on his first day at Channel 5, John had gone to his editor and said he was not sure he could carry on.
The man who had built his career appearing unshakable on live television—“dealing with everything they could throw at me”, as he describes it—was no longer certain he could keep his own life from falling apart.
The reason was dementia. Not his own, but his wife Bonnie’s. John had taken on the second job nobody applies for: becoming a carer. The neurologist who delivered the diagnosis advised him to go home and put a sign on the bathroom door so Bonnie could find it—a detail that revealed the daunting future ahead.
“My first day on the job was exactly two weeks after Bonnie’s diagnosis,” he recalls. “I remember going to see the editor and saying I was going to have to pull out. As it happened, I lasted for another two years.”
They were two punishing years, familiar to anyone trying to preserve some semblance of their own life while watching their partner’s disappear.
Now 82, John can still identify the moments of utter desperation. There was the struggle to shower Bonnie when she could no longer do it herself, leaving both of them—and the bathroom floor—soaked.
Television journalist John Suchet with his wife Bonnie, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2006 at the age of 64
Nula Black with her husband James, who was diagnosed with Pick’s disease, a form of frontotemporal dementia, in 2004 aged 57
A relationship shaped by tragedy: John and Nula met in the care home where their partners lived and married in 2016
There were also the times he lost his temper while trying to undress her for bed, or held her so tightly that he left a bruise. He wanted to cry as he prepared yet another late-night meal in the microwave—the sort of food Bonnie, once an exceptional cook with exacting nutritional standards, would never have served.
He tried taking her on work trips because she could not be left alone, only to face the terror of discovering that she had wandered from their hotel room in an unfamiliar city.
Bonnie stood beside him at the glittering television awards ceremony where he received his Lifetime Achievement Award. By then, however, she had little understanding of what was happening. She was able to attend only because the couple also brought the housekeeper who had become a paid carer. It was Bonnie’s final public appearance.
The following year, in 2009, John made the agonising decision to move his wife into a care home. The “guilt demon” still troubles him, even though he knows it was the right decision.
In the memoir he published in 2010, John described watching himself on a pre-recorded television programme on the night he submitted the paperwork for Bonnie’s care-home placement. “How thoroughly professional I looked,” he wrote.
“I sat watching myself as if I were looking at some entirely different creature. On screen, the television presenter with decades of experience, able to cope with anything they threw at him. In the armchair, watching him, an emotional wreck with tears pricking at the back of his eyes and a sodden tissue in his hand.”
He says there was a particular cruelty in the situation. The person with whom he would once have shared such anguish was Bonnie herself.
“What makes it so lonely is that you can’t share your experience with the person you love most in the world,” John tells The Mail on Sunday.
“If your partner has cancer, at least you can talk about it together. Bonnie didn’t understand what was happening to her. We couldn’t discuss dementia because she didn’t know she had it.
John Suchet with Bonnie in 1996
“That’s why, when I met Nula, we talked and talked about it. We couldn’t stop.”
Bonnie died in the care home in 2015. By then, John had met Nula—the woman he would marry and who remains by his side today.
Their relationship grew from shared tragedy and a deep understanding of what the other had endured. Nula, now 77, had been following a remarkably similar path.
In 2004, her husband James, a talented filmmaker and writer, was diagnosed with Pick’s disease, a form of frontotemporal dementia, at the age of just 57. He became a resident in the same care home as Bonnie. Both men died there—James a year before Bonnie.
John and Nula are speaking out as supporters of the Mail’s ground-breaking Dementia Carers Together campaign. The appeal aims to raise at least £1 million to fund courses that provide unpaid carers with practical guidance and, crucially, someone they can turn to for support.
“Dementia is unlike any other disease because the carer carries the entire burden,” John says. “Carers should be able to pick up the phone and speak to someone who understands and can help. They should not be left to cope alone.”
Like John, Nula was a high achiever before dementia abruptly pulled her into a world for which she had no preparation. An interior designer whose work took her abroad, she initially tried to take James on business trips, hoping to maintain some kind of normal life.
“I remember travelling to New York and Paris and paying hotel porters to keep an eye on him while I went out to work,” she says. “But it soon became impossible to leave him by himself. Eventually I had to give up work altogether. I had no income and had to sell the house.”
John Suchet with Nula in 2019. They met in a care home while Bonnie had dementia and their lives were unfolding along similar paths
Dementia affects every person differently. Bonnie remained gentle and even docile until the end, whereas James underwent a marked personality change. His inhibitions disappeared, Nula says. He would throw food from his plate in restaurants, urinate wherever he happened to be and go to bed wearing a suit and tie.
He also became physically aggressive. “He was 6ft 2in and I am 5ft 3in, so it was frightening at times. I wasn’t eating or sleeping.”
John eventually had the financial resources to hire assistance and was given access to an Admiral nurse, a specialist in dementia care whom he credits with saving his life.
Nula had no such safety net. She was frightened, financially vulnerable and profoundly isolated. Friends who might once have offered comfort began to withdraw—a neglected but important part of the experience of caring for someone with dementia.
“One friend even told me: ‘I’m sick and tired of you talking about dementia.’ But that was my life. And it was incredibly lonely.”
Both describe how quickly dementia can dismantle a person’s career, finances, friendships and sense of security. “It changes your whole life. Every part of it,” John says. “Everything familiar.”
He also recalls reaching for whatever offered temporary relief. In his case, that included alcohol.
“We were drinking quite a lot of wine at the time,” he says. “It calmed Bonnie and, if I’m honest, it calmed me too. But looking back, eating badly and drinking too much did not help.”
John and Bonnie at an awards ceremony. They married in 1985
John and Bonnie, who had once been neighbours, married in 1985. They were kindred spirits who shared a passion for music and travel. They had expected to spend retirement at their farmhouse in France, travelling to opera houses across Europe while John developed a second career as a writer. He has since written biographies of several composers.
Then Bonnie began misplacing things and forgetting information. Severe headaches followed. “Bonnie described it as though the wiring in her head had become tangled.”
During one particularly unsettling incident, she went to the toilet in an airport departure lounge and was later summoned over the public-address system. John found her at the information desk, bewildered. The couple moved from one doctor to another without an explanation.
“I firmly believe Bonnie had dementia for years before anyone used that word,” John says. “We went from one quack to another, but nobody could work out what was wrong. In some ways, it was a relief when we finally received the diagnosis.”
That relief did not last. A diagnosis provided a name for the illness, but it did not teach John how to become a carer or prepare him to watch his wife lose one basic ability after another.
Bonnie had always taken charge of cooking. John admits he had never cooked and had no desire to learn, so after presenting the news he found himself putting ready meals in the microwave.
At first, he allowed Bonnie to serve the food so she could retain the feeling that she was contributing. “But eventually even that became too much for her,” he says. He arranged for a housekeeper to help, only to find that the presence of a stranger confused Bonnie.
Each day brought a fresh challenge, and often a new shock. Bonnie, once impeccably dressed and meticulous about details such as her manicures, became incontinent and began shredding toilet paper throughout the house. The behaviour was distressing and bewildering for John. He says it was almost a mercy that she did not realise what was happening.
One journey through Stansted Airport, on the way to France, remains especially painful. The terminal was crowded, and a security officer instructed Bonnie to remove her shoes before going through the scanner. She did not understand what he wanted and he shouted at her. “I turned to him and said: ‘That’s my wife. She’s got dementia.’ He said: ‘I don’t care.’ I had to take her shoes off for her.” The humiliation still affects him.
John’s Admiral nurse eventually convinced him that Bonnie needed residential care. If something happened to him, who would look after her? Knowing that did not make the decision any less agonising.
“I told her we were going on holiday somewhere nice,” he says of taking Bonnie to the care home. “It was heartbreaking, but I knew it was the right thing. Carers often die before the people they look after. What would have happened to Bonnie if I had gone first?”
Nula reached the same conclusion about James when she could no longer physically get him into the shower.
John and Nula met at a lunch held at the care home in 2011. They shared a love of opera and travel, but it was their experience of dementia that created the strongest bond. Each understood the impossible decisions the other had been forced to make.
They began meeting for dinner. “We had both kept so many worries bottled up for years,” John says.
Their friendship gradually became something deeper, but the situation was far from simple. Bonnie and James were still alive, though both had advanced dementia and could no longer recognise or communicate with their spouses. John and Nula felt guilty about the relationship that was developing.
A holiday together in Vienna should have been joyful and liberating. Instead, Nula says, “once we arrived, we felt so guilty about what we were doing that it ruined the trip.”
Nula’s memories of James’s final weeks are deeply moving. She played him The Marriage of Figaro. He had barely reacted to anything for some time, but that morning tears streamed down his face.
James died in 2014, and Nula decided she should stop seeing John. He continued to write to her, often sending articles about dementia. Her friends encouraged her to reconsider. “So I gave him another chance, and that’s how we fell in love,” she says.
Bonnie died in 2015, and John and Nula married the following year. At their wedding, they raised a glass to Bonnie and James, as they continue to do. Over the past decade, they have created a happy home in Dartmouth, Devon, enjoying the kind of life each had once imagined sharing with their first spouses.
John presents on Classic FM and writes about his great passion, Beethoven, while Nula is working on a novel. But neither sees their happiness as a way of wiping away the past. They acknowledge the scars they carry and hope their story can help others feel less isolated.
“There is no roadmap for dealing with this disease,” Nula says. “I had nobody to contact and nobody who could help me.” John adds: “No one can do this alone, and no one should be expected to.”
