What to watch
Chris Packham: Asperger’s and Me
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
“What you probably don’t know about me, because I’ve been hiding it all my life, is that my brain is different than yours because I’m autistic.” So says wildlife presenter Chris Packham at the outset of this fascinating and affecting film.
Packham, a familiar face to British television viewers for the past 30 years due to such programmes as The
Really Wild Show and Springwatch, always knew he was different. He had found himself isolated at school and developed an obsession with the natural world. Nevertheless, he was able to forge a very successful media career. Then, in his forties, he was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.
Here he sets out to explain how he “experiences the world in a different way” and the strategies he has developed for negotiating through it. More importantly, and in many ways more interestingly, he also travels to America where mainstream educational attitudes seek to “cure” or behaviourally retrain children with autistic traits. This is an approach that runs contrary to his own passionate belief that autism can be a great “gift” if it is properly managed and directed. Gerard O’donovan