Marr’s road to recovery
IT WOULD be wrong to say that ANDREW MARR: MY BRAIN AND ME (BBC2) gave us a glimpse of the man behind the media persona. The Andrew Marr we see reporting on political events, presenting documentaries and grilling MPs has always, I think, contained quite a bit of the real bloke.
No one who defines journalism as, “the industrialisation of gossip” is taking themselves too seriously. A serious thing certainly happened to Mr Marr though in January 2013 when a “small, tomato-sized area” of his brain was knocked out due to a stroke.
Keen-eyed observers of his TV appearances may now detect a slight lack of muscle on one side of the broadcaster’s face, or an arm that seems less active than the other. Other people might not notice anything and as a result be entirely oblivious to the struggles faced and still being faced.
Frustration and embarrassment were parts of the journey that Marr didn’t try to hide. He sometimes asked the cameras not to film things. Struggling to complete simple tasks and endlessly repeating movements in order to get his motor skills back were clearly part of the daily grind and sometimes he looked like a man ground down by them.
A person’s strengths can so often be part of their weaknesses and that seemed, in among the science and the interviews and the journey in search of new treatments, to be a personal theme.
Colleagues and loved ones spoke of a whirlwind personality, forever finishing books while filming new TV series, never at rest.
The stroke may well have had something to do with that but so did his recovery. It was the same dogged journalistic quality that he brought to this film as he experimented on himself with radical treatments and interviewed fellow sufferers.
The result was as positive as any programme about strokes could be. There’s hope, it seems, not just for driven types such as Andrew Marr but from ground-breaking new treatments.
But one of the best hopes comes from early intervention and it was a pity the programme didn’t spare a moment to remind us of that.
Buildings are often at their most interesting, it seems, when they’re on the verge of collapse. SECRETS OF THE NATIONAL TRUST WITH ALAN TITCHMARSH (Channel 5) saw the presenter following expert teams of restorers and renovators as they worked on an historic property in Kent.
Knole House, formerly home to the Archbishops of Canterbury, then to the Earls of Dorset, had been rebuilt constantly over six centuries, each new version of the house enveloping previous ones. Behind panels there were hidden corridors untrodden for centuries.
If that wasn’t creepy enough (and a long way from the cosy world of the gift shop), there were witchmarks in the attic, special etched designs to prevent dark spirits from flying in through the chimney.
Elsewhere, specialist teams were preserving and cataloguing as if the place was a crime scene. Every scrap of debris found under the floorboards was being bagged, from 21st century paperclips to 400-year-old bits of shoe leather.
Wielding a gas spectrometer in another room, an expert was analysing the smell of the old books. One day perhaps we’ll be able to visit historic places such as Knole and inhale the aromas of the past. Personally I’d settle for a postcard from the gift shop.