Gail Porter and the disarming realities of mental health
BBC Radio went gaga for Mental Health Awareness Week last week, offering up a plethora of “open conversations”, soothing beats and softly spoken ephemera. You can’t but applaud the endeavour, even if all this talk of anxiety and healing and self-love can start to sound a bit excessively Californian to British ears.
We Brits often get a little guarded by anything that smells like therapy, so it is better if these things can happen by accident. That is a niche that comedians Elis James and John Robins have been filling on the radio for years, first on XFM, now BBC 5 Live. Their rapport is jovial, accessibly blokey, just cerebral enough, but always open and honest.
It is this subtly vulnerable masculinity that has lead to them to presenting three series of their excellent podcast How Do You Cope?… with Elis and John, in which they talk to a celebrity about their struggles (Brian May on depression; Darren Gough on alcoholism). When I heard that their latest guest was the former TV presenter and model Gail Porter (Tuesday, BBC Sounds), I held my breath in expectation that the podcast’s central question would come across as a sick joke.
How does Gail Porter cope? Well, famously, she doesn’t. Catapulted to stardom in the Nineties by a
combination of high-profile presenting gigs (Top of the Pops, Big Breakfast) and even more high-profile lads’ mag shoots (infamously, her naked image was projected onto the side of the House of Commons to advertise FHM), Porter suffered a breakdown in the mid-2000s which became the subject of many a lurid tabloid write-up.
Robins admitted it was extraordinary to be interviewing someone who had the “full set”: anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, alopecia, alcoholism, being sectioned… Here we were, then, about to be treated to the car crash of two decades suffered by Porter, one of the most famous victims of the Nineties celebrity slash-and-burn culture.
Porter, however, proved far more remarkable than Robins’s list of afflictions. “If you want to add something else to that, I’m bipolar too”, she chipped in. Later, when describing the moment she was involuntarily sectioned, she chortled: “It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. But not now, because I’ve written a great book [about it].” Another chortle. “Sorry, this is serious, I shouldn’t be laughing…” There was a lot of chortling from Porter.
Given what she has survived, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear Porter spout a load of therapy-speak, but she was as refreshingly no-nonsense as you’d hope a bald, 51-year-old from Edinburgh to be. Therapy? Didn’t work for her. Medication? She won’t touch it. So, how does she cope? Exercise, mainly, her new “addiction”, but really, as she explained, she doesn’t know. “I wish I could say something really positive,” she said. “Perhaps I’m just a stoic Scottish person.”
And those Nineties years that chewed her up and spat her out? “I chose to do it, I wasn’t forced into anything, I had a great time,” she said. The closest she came to tears was when Robins asked how she coped with loneliness, since she lives alone with her cat. “I haven’t figured that one out yet,” she said.
It was the most disarming conversation on mental health I have heard in years, ably abetted by Robins’s direct inquisition and James’s softer interjections (hearing James discuss his father, also bipolar, now in a care home, was extremely moving). How does Gail Porter cope? She hasn’t figured it out yet. Robins and James seemed impressed by that.
One suggestion, if only to give her the briefest of uplifts, would be to listen to A Life in Miniatures (Thursday, Radio 4), a little beauty of a documentary by the novelist Max Porter about his lifelong love of Bekonscot Model Village. There was a lot of whimsy – the 6”7’ Porter booming his way through the village like a giant, providing silly voices for the villagers – but there was something serious under all the playfulness too. Both a look at the act of creation – “For my second novel, I built a model village in my head and lived there for quite a while” – and the warmest embrace by Porter for what is surely his comfort blanket.
“I don’t mind admitting that I am a bit scared of this world,” said Porter, whose breakthrough novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, dealt with the death of his father when he was six. Model villages help him “sort out what’s what”. There’s mindfulness for you. As therapy and medication have failed Gail Porter, I might suggest she tries getting into model villages. Max Porter’s giddy, nervous thrill at visiting Bekonscot – for the 75th time – was a wonderful tonic.