Last night on television David Harewood’s searingly personal mental health film
‘Thirty years ago, I lost my mind and was locked away,” says David Harewood in Psychosis and Me
(BBC Two). In what was a courageous, searingly personal film, the 53-year-old actor – best known for The Night Manager and Homeland – retraced the terrifying breakdown he suffered in his youth.
In the UK, he told us, psychosis affects roughly one in 100. Like a mental health edition of Who Do You Think You Are?, Harewood accessed his medical records to piece together what happened and was reunited with people who witnessed his spiralling decline, most of whom he hadn’t discussed it with since.
We heard how, after leaving Rada and finding touring theatre work, he became lonely and depressed due to being away from home. Self-medicating with alcohol and cannabis, he became manic and began hearing voices. His best friends at the time, lovely chaps called Mark and Jez, recalled how they found him punching a corkscrew through a copy of Shakespeare and took him to hospital, where he was ultimately sectioned.
It took six policemen to restrain and sedate him. “The next thing I remember is waking up in a locked room surrounded by psychiatric patients,” Harewood said. Unearthing
these long-buried traumatic memories led him to the edge all over again. “I feel like an exposed nerve,” he tearfully admitted. “I’m a bit of mess.“
We heard about Harewood’s experiences of racism and how black men in Britain are four times more likely to be sectioned. Experts explained that the “everyday struggle” of discrimination and marginalisation can have a cumulative effect. There’s a documentary crying out to be made on this topic, too.
Alongside his own story, Harewood broadened out to consider the context of our ongoing mental health crisis. He met youngsters going through similar struggles today and formed a warmly paternal bond with two of them: heavily tattooed Callum, whose experiences eerily paralleled Harewood’s, and the articulate, astonishingly sanguine Kanwaree, who stepped in front of a lorry when voices told her to. “I try not to let my past haunt me too much,” she said.
In a week where television’s responsibility to vulnerable people has been called into question following the death of a Jeremy Kyle Show guest, this was the polar opposite: increasing understanding of mental health issues. For this raw, honest, deeply intimate film, Harewood and the inspirational people he met were to be applauded. Michael Hogan
Belinda Blinked is the “best, worst book ever written,” explained Radio 1 presenter Alice Levine. She’s right. The raunchy novel, read aloud and scrutinised in minute detail on the popular My Dad Wrote a Porno podcast, is compulsive, repulsive and terribly, unintentionally funny.
The podcast is the brainchild of Jamie Morton, whose father, known only as Rocky Flintstone, one day revealed he’d been writing a series of 50 Shades of Grey-style books featuring a promiscuous saucepan saleswoman called Belinda Blumenthal. Morton drafted in two friends, Levine and TV producer James Cooper, to pore over his father’s clunky prose and worrying ignorance of the female anatomy, and the podcast was born.
It has had four series, generated more than 160 million downloads, live tours, a bestselling book and now a one-off TV special for HBO/SKY Atlantic, which was filmed in London. The TV version ran along the same lines as the podcast: the three friends drinking wine and giggling while reading smut. But this time, they’ve sacrificed intimacy in favour of brash visual elements, such as a graph charting Belinda’s sexual history, that tries a bit too hard to elicit a laugh, and clunky audience participation (when two female audience members were invited to act out a scene which involved touching each other’s breasts, the result was cringeworthy).
It’s not that Morton, Levine and Cooper didn’t pull their weight. They complemented each other brilliantly and their one-liners were razor sharp. But the podcast’s appeal is the feeling that you’re shooting the breeze with three of your wittiest friends. By contrast, the live show was contrived and performative, which undermined the premise of the format – that Morton is mortified to know that this erotic literature horror show was penned by his father. The way he squirmed when reading Rocky’s one-time dirty secret felt disingenuous. The episode began with Morton musing that the success of his dad’s “porno” has gotten out of hand, and by the end of the show, I agreed with him. Theodora Louloudis
David Harewood: Psychosis and Me ★★★★★ My Dad Wrote a Porno ★★