SLATTERY’S MOVING JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY IS TELEVISION OF THE HIGHEST ORDER

REVIEW

SEEING famous faces from your childhood years later can be unsettling, but nothing quite prepared me for Tony Slattery in 2020. In the 1990s he was handsome, confident, gifted, energetic – popping up everywhere from The Crying Game to Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Twenty-five years on, he cuts an altogether different figure: bloated, fragile, trembling and uncertain. Such are the combined effects of cocaine

Horizon: What’s The Matter With Tony Slattery? BBC2

HHHHH addiction (kicked in 2000), heavy drinking (still a problem) and… well, what, exactly?

This was what he himself as ‘a professional optimist’ who has ‘known a dozen versions of Tony over the years’ and had to approach each one differently. He remains an inspiration.

After a morale-boosting reunion with old pal and bipolar sufferer Stephen Fry, Slattery met a succession of experts in addiction and mental illness. The pain was, at times, almost impossible to watch; his graphic revelation of childhood abuse at the hands of a priest was somehow both expected and deeply shocking, not least for the guilt he carried about it. But there was hope too, as Slattery got closer to understanding his condition and taking steps towards managing it.

Horizon’s dalliances with celebrities don’t always work but this one does, balancing our natural curiosity about his story with an illuminating understanding about why bipolar is so hard to diagnose.

It was a moving celebration of an enduring love; revealing and responsible television of the highest order.

was determined to discover: only an accurate diagnosis would get him the treatment he needed. Slattery (pictured) wanted to get back to something resembling normal work and real life, but needed to understand his condition to do so, having propped himself up thus far with alcohol, antidepressants and his extraordinary partner of 32 years, Mark Michael Hutchinson. Tireless and affectionate, he calls