Life and times

The news presenter and Young Minds ambassador on father-son moments and tough questions

News presenter and Young Minds ambassador Sean Fletcher

‘YOUR TRIM IS BORING, and you’ve got a lot of grey in your beard,’ my 15-year-old son Reuben announced the other day. ‘But I think we’d have been good mates if you were my age.’ After establishing that ‘trim’ is hair, I told him that was the kindest thing I’d been told in a while. I was cooking our favourite dish, beans-on-cheese-on-toast. The meal tasted even better than usual. For Reuben, it was because I had sprinkled extra grated cheese on his. For me, it was because a moment of simple joy like this once seemed impossible.

Three years ago, Reuben was diagnosed with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. He started to show signs of anxiety in the last year of primary school. Then, as he and his friends began building up to GCSES, OCD struck. He spent seven months in hospital, often unable to get out of bed and complete basic tasks, like eating and brushing his teeth. When my wife and I weren’t crying, we blamed ourselves. Did we work too much? Not show enough love?

No one tells you how much mental illness affects the families. Reuben’s 18-month wait for the correct treatment led me to make a BBC Panorama on the cash-strapped Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service. While we waited, others helped – friends and family, as well as Young Minds, the charity I became an ambassador for. Eventually Reuben received cognitive behavioural therapy at the Maudsley Hospital in south London, where staff gave him the tools to deal with OCD. I can’t thank them enough.

I didn’t see how anything positive could come from those harrowing years. But while Reuben will always have OCD, his struggles have subsided. And without his illness I may not have spent so much time writing music with him. Above all, I may not have come to cherish the fatherson bond we have now. Also, I may not have bought the Tottenham season tickets I promised as a reward when he left hospital. We now spend every other Saturday together at Wembley, watching football and eating burgers. If only they sold beans-on-cheese-on-toast.

‘I BET YOU £10,000 Arsenal will finish higher than Tottenham this season.’ Piers Morgan thrust out his hand. This was no fair fight. We were live on Good Morning Britain and, as usual, he was like a double espresso and I was wide awake with adrenalin in my regular role as news presenter. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s shake on it.’ I may be ‘Tottenham till I die’ but I’m not stupid. The prospect of Piers paying for my next holiday was tempting, but I sat on my hands. All bets were off. I shuddered at how close I’d come to being in debt to the Mr Marmite of British media.

A FEW MONTHS AGO I was invited to appear on Celebrity Mastermind for charity. I was flattered, then the cold sweats kicked in. I was about to decline, but the two women in my life – my wife and my agent – insisted otherwise: ‘It’s for Young Minds, Sean, you have to do it.’ But what subject? The sexual innuendos of Prince (the musician, not HRH)? Tottenham’s broken dreams (and lost bets)? Then my 20-year-old daughter Lili hit on a humdinger: Sesame Street. My first love. Three weeks later I was in that black leather chair, opposite John Humphrys. ‘How tall is the anthropomorphic canary, Big Bird?’ All I could think was, he’s taller than Prince and probably won more trophies than Tottenham.

Young Minds is a mental-health charity that helps thousands of parents and carers to stop young people from coming to harm. To donate to Young Minds through the Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal for 2018, visit telegraph. co.uk/charity or call 0151-284 1927

When my wife and I weren’t crying, we blamed ourselves. Did we not show enough love?