Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
From fear to understanding
BBC1, 9pm TV presenter Paddy Mcguinness and his wife Christine have three children, eight-year-old twins, Leo and Penelope and Felicity, who is five.
All their children have been diagnosed with autism, a condition that means your brain works in a different way from other people.
“No one we knew had kids the same age, so all the stressful things that happened, we just presumed that’s what it is,” says Paddy. He recalls how the kids didn’t sleep and would have meltdowns at loud noises and bright lights.
This emotional and intimate documentary follows the couple over several months, with Paddy opening up about his struggle with the diagnosis and his depression.
He threw himself into work, avoiding the issue, while Christine accepted it more quickly and explored how to support them.
“I avoided it because I was scared,” he admits. “I do feel a lot of families feel a bit lost.”
In the film, he and Christine meet experts, people on the autism spectrum and their parents, including footballer Paul Scholes, who has a 16-year-old non-verbal autistic son.
They meet Professor Simon Baron-cohen at Cambridge University, who says: “It’s just who the person is, with their unique strengths and challenges”.
Simon tests Paddy and Christine’s autistic traits and the results start a whole new journey for the couple.
Over the course of filming and learning more about autism, Paddy and Christine come to a much stronger understanding of what it means for their family.
Paddy says: “I just wish I hadn’t spent so much time trapped by the fear of it all.”