WILL YOUNG: LOSING MY TWIN RUPERT
Channel 4, 10.05pm
Aprofoundly moving, courageous and insightful treatise on living with addiction, this soulbaring love letter-cumeulogy has a campaigning edge. While the singer Will Young was able to fund his twin brother Rupert’s many visits to rehab prior to his death by suicide in July 2020, affordable, accessible treatments for alcohol dependency are woefully thin on the ground and desperately underfunded, the result in part of the stigmas attached to an illness too often assumed to be someone’s fault.
Young speaks fondly and wittily of Rupert, who basked shamelessly in the glory of his brother’s chart success (“This is his idea of heaven,” says Will of the documentary). He is also candid about his conflicted feelings as addiction took hold, tightening its grip to the extent that Will was eventually forced to kick Rupert out of his home. Their parents also appear, still grieving and bewildered by their son’s decline (Will speculates its roots may have lain in a miserable stretch at boarding school). It is understandably light on hope, but there is comfort to be found here through the effectiveness of residential rehab for those that can access it, and in the art therapy some relatives of addicts have taken up.