PAXMAN’S BIGGEST CHALLENGE

Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease last year, Jeremy Paxman investigates the illness with his famous tenacity in an inspiring documentary

PAXMAN: PUTTING UP WITH PARKINSON’S

He’s the national treasure of British broadcasting who struck terror first into politicians on Newsnight, then more recently into the student contestants of University Challenge. Now, after being diagnosed last year with Parkinson’s disease, Jeremy Paxman is showing the same formidable character in battling the condition, as an inspiring new documentary reveals.

As cameras follow him between his home, meeting friends, and recording in a TV studio, Paxman declares: ‘I don’t want people’s sympathy. I just want them to say, “Well, that bloke’s got it.”’

The best-selling author explains how even the writing he loves so much has now become a struggle. ‘I can’t type.

It’s really annoying. I think I’ve written something and then it turns out to be gibberish,’ he says, adding of his condition: ‘I’m not living with it. I’m putting up with it.’

But far from being resigned to his fate, he’s determined to do all he can to slow the progression of a condition which 18,000 of us will be diagnosed with every year in Britain, and is putting himself through a wide range of physical therapies.

At the English National Ballet, he takes a specialist dance class where the members include The Vicar Of Dibley co-writer Paul Mayhew-Archer, a fellow Parkinson’s sufferer. Trying out crown green bowls for the first time, Paxman takes to the game straight away with what he self-deprecatingly calls beginner’s luck – even as the 72-year-old admits with some irony: ‘I always thought this was for old people.’

Despite his increasing physical limitations, he investigates the disease with the insatiable curiosity and instincts he’s had as a professional journalist going back half a century. Those he meets include the doctor who first spotted his diagnosis while watching Paxman on TV and noticing that his face had become less expressive in recent years – a telltale sign. At a laboratory, Paxman gets an up-close glimpse of a cross-section of a brain visibly affected by the disease, while he also has a chance to compare his experience with comedian and fellow Parkinson’s sufferer Paul

Sinha, and Sharon Osbourne tells him how her husband Ozzy is coping with the condition.

Perhaps most memorably, he also meets former Home Secretary Michael Howard, now a friend but once his target on Newsnight, when Paxman famously asked the Tory grandee the same question a dozen times in 1997.

It’s a telling reminder of the sheer tenacity of Paxman – a man who never gives up, whatever the challenge.