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Nicky Campbell on his four-legged therapist
The TV host talks to Hannah Stephenson about the pet that helped him through a crisis
NICKY Campbell was at breaking point. The Edinburgh-born broadcaster had just finished his Radio 5 live breakfast show, talking to politicians and callers while inwardly obsessing about a disturbing story he’d read about a family of elephants being killed by a train in India. Stumbling out of the building in what he describes as a “zombie march” down London’s Euston Road, he arrived at his station and collapsed to his knees sobbing on a patch of grass near the entrance.
He phoned his wife Tina, got a cab home and sought medical help. Shortly afterwards, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In his new book, One of the Family, he describes how his faithful golden Labrador, Maxwell, brought him solace.
“When I had my little breakdown at Euston Station, Tina said, ‘Come back, come and see Maxwell’. Of course I wanted to see Tina and the girls [they have four daughters], but there was this four-legged magical thing that will not know anything but will know everything; that will not understand but will be completely empathetic; won’t know what’s going on but will somehow completely understand. Also, I won’t need to say anything – he won’t ask any questions.”
When we spoke on Zoom, the seasoned broadcaster seems as downto-earth and controlled as ever, not the struggling figure on the grass he was in 2013.
“Everything just got on top of me. It was boiling up inside and I just went. It was a very out-of-body experience, with people walking past me, almost stepping over me,” he remembers. “People must have thought, ‘Oh, my God, that’s the guy who used to do Wheel of Fortune, lying there weeping!’ Maybe they thought I was praying,” he adds with a chuckle.
At the time, he had become obsessed with animal cruelty, agonising over every documentary he saw or story he read, just as he had long obsessed over litter louts, scooping up receipts from discarded bottles and pizza boxes in his local park and taking them home for forensic inspection to try to catch the culprits, until Tina talked him down.
After the breakdown, his GP referred him to a psychiatrist and he admits the self-revelation was agony.
“It’s tough hearing yourself give voice to it all because you feel like a fool, like it’s another person talking, and a part of you is rolling your eyes saying, ‘Get a grip, you weirdo’. Going out on the common, hiding behind cars and bushes, lying in wait for litter louts. Seriously? I told him everything, the obsessions, fixations, the manic missions, the terrible lows, deep depressions and despair,” Campbell writes.
Being diagnosed with bipolar disorder was a relief. “People have depression and mental health issues, especially now. So many people are suffering so badly and may only get 10 minutes with their GP. But I had four or five sessions [with the psychiatrist] before he said, ‘This is what you have and this is what you need’. The diagnosis and prescription is vital.
“I was lucky, and I weep for people who don’t have that opportunity.”
His bipolar disorder gave him a connection to his birth mother, who also had it. Campbell, 59, was adopted at a few days old by Edinburgh couple Sheila and Frank Campbell, who gave him a loving, stable family environment. But being adopted had long made him feel like an imposter, who harboured “gnawing feelings of abandonment” despite the fact his adoptive family clearly loved him dearly and gave him all the warmth and security any child would need.
Aged 29, he traced and met his birth mother, an Irish nurse, but effectively pushed her away, feeling there was no connection, and didn’t read the many letters she sent him over the years, until after she died.
“She was incredibly persistent and I had terrible things going on in my life at the time and just couldn’t spin those plates,” he says now.
“She wanted to be our mum and she wasn’t. I was looking for reasons to understand stuff. I had an amazing [adoptive] mum.”
Co-presenting Long Lost Family, which reunites relatives after years of separation, made him feel he needed to open up about himself in his book.
“It was a tortuous, difficult, allconsuming process to write it, but it’s good to share these things,” he says. “We ask people to open up and it would be a bit hypocritical if we weren’t, when required, as candid as we possibly can be about feelings and about life and about things that people can identify with.” He acknowledges that he’s on medication for his bipolar disorder indefinitely. “I still get obsessions and hyper-focused,” he observes. “I have doldrum days,but I know why it’s happening.”
Maxwell still helps support Campbell’s wellbeing when he has bad days. “I just touch him or smell his ears and get a rush of wellbeing and security inside of me. It’s a deepseated emotional and psychological trigger that makes me feel better. He’s my four-legged therapist.
“If you sit there with him, he’ll snuggle into you and put his head in your lap and just want to be with you. It’s one of the best feelings in the world.”
Campbell didn’t have a dog for many years after his childhood pet died because of fear of loss and grief. Today he has three – two Westies and Maxwell, who is nearly 13. Is he worried about the end?
“I don’t know how we’ll deal with it,” he says candidly. “We talk about it more and more. But Maxwell’s mother is still around,so hopefully he’ll last a bit longer.”