![]() Jonny, a voice-hearer himself, answers all of them, and came across as a thoroughly winning companion, and has, it is teensily possible, done a little more for urgent understanding and concomitant empathy than Hopkins, who can’t even envisage a belt without hitting below it, this past week.Ī terrific Joanna Scanlan in No Offence: ‘unapologetically, vividly, chunky, sweaty and sweary, and deeply real’. Last week Sun columnist Katie Hopkins tweeted “starting to wish let him jump”.) Second, to my mind at least, a mind not particularly of the Twittersphere, the extraordinary effect Jonny’s search has had in enabling, from Sydney to Bhutan to Chattanooga, other sufferers of mental-health disorders to get in contact, in tones ranging from the hilarious and genius-lucid to the pleasantly bonkers. Some people just can’t help their own personalities. (The fact that many more fake “Mikes” came hopping forward wasn’t a surprise. ![]() First, that so many people called Mike had, indeed, been genuinely involved in talking suicides off London bridges in early 2008. Cue, eventually, a lovely chap, Neil Laybourn, and a thumping reunion. The Stranger on the Bridge was a well-paced documentary that told, mainly in Jonny’s own words, the story of his search, which ended trending globally on Facebook and Twitter, for the passerby, whom he’d come to think of, wrongly it turned out, as “Mike”. More tears, more surprisingly, for the tale of Jonny Benjamin, who six years ago tried to throw himself off Waterloo bridge, only to be talked down by a passerby. Thumping reunion… Jonny Benjamin and, behind him, Neil Laybourn in The Stranger on the Bridge. Another Bafta next year for the talented Ms Smith? I suspect she would prefer a posthumous… something… for the talented Ms Lynch. This was as thankfully far from those made-for-TV US cancer dramas, all god-rot homilies and damnable Bread songs over lingering shots of maples, as it would be possible for a drama to be without it actually featuring zombie space iguanas. ![]() Hence the thunderously likable Sheridan Smith, and the breezy gob on her, and the subtle interactions with dear hubbie Pete (Paul Nicholls), whether cheeking each other in London pub gardens or, later, giving a spirited middle finger to America after they wouldn’t let her visit for health insurance reasons (or offering a wistfully apologetic “um… I wrote it!” to the counsellor, a lovely if bittersweet moment). ![]() And, after a too-quick and gloriously life-affirming period of remission, Lisa died. (Dennis Potter had dubbed his pancreatic ditto “Rupert”, and not after a bear.) Then she wrote a hugely popular book – it went to No 1 in the Amazon charts after Sunday night’s drama – which, in this faithful retelling, she was actually offered to read as part of her counselling. She nicknamed her breast cancer “the bullshit”. Aided by a fast Derbyshire mouth, and the quick intelligence which befits a magazine editor, she first blogged about it, homing in not on philosophical “why me?” up-bottom whining but practical advice and naughty words, the colour charts for nipple-tattoos, and the wigs. But Lisa Lynch, who died just recently, five years after first diagnosis, found new avenues for inherent humour. Very little funny about cancer, of course, unless, like me, you can muster a twisted smile at the way some will insist on portraying select celebs and toddlers as having fought a “brave” fight, as if other sufferers are yellow pantywaist milquetoasts and somehow deserve it. ![]() There were tears, certainly, at the start of it, in both The C Word and The Stranger on the Bridge. Tears, bloodletting and laughter tended, aptly enough, to dominate this past week, a pathetic fallacy of a backcloth to the political witchery. ![]()
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