Issues to work out for national hero
TV PICK OF THE WEEK
Joe Wicks: Facing My Childhood BBC1, MONDAY, 9PM
Joe Wicks became a national hero during lockdown with his hugely successful PE With Joe workouts. But now it’s not just the nation’s physical health that concerns him – it’s our mental health.
Many of the thousands of letters and messages that Joe has received since he began his workouts were from parents, confiding in him about their own struggles and their worries for their children. Unfortunately Joe knows all too well how stressful and confusing it can be when you are a child and your mum and dad aren’t well – and he wants to find out more.
In Joe Wicks: Facing My Childhood,
Joe opens up on about his mother’s OCD, eating disorders and anxiety, as well as his father’s heroin addiction and depression. He wants to understand how his family’s illnesses affected him when he was a child and how we can better support kids and families living in similar situations today.
According to the NHS, before the pandemic some 3.7 million children were living with a parent who had a moderate or severe mental health condition. Unfortunately, all the data suggests that will only have increased in the years since. But even though, without support, children whose parents have mental illness are more likely to go on to have mental health conditions themselves, there is a chronic lack of support for children in this situation.
To discover more, Joe visits Our Time, the UK’s only charity dedicated to working with children of parents with mental illness. But as he explores the issue, he starts to ask questions about both his own childhood and how his early life experiences have affected him as an adult.
Lusus AVAILABLE ON BBC SOUNDS
REVIEW BY YVETTE HUDDLESTON
This dark, unusual and unsettling new drama series explores modern-day fears such as FOMO (the fear of missing out), worries about the environment, hypochondria and the fear of ageing. Then, gradually during the narrative of each episode, the central character’s fear takes a turn into the nightmarish as they are led into a situation which is truly terrifying. It all makes for compelling, and scary, listening.