“How come it’s taken me until my 57th year of life to discover that I have bipolar?” asks Heston Blumenthal, in the sobering new BBC Two documentary Heston: My Life with Bipolar. The chef – whose radical culinary creativity made him one of the stars of this century’s global food scene – was only diagnosed with the condition in 2023, when police were called to his home in France. He was hallucinating and had lost contact with reality; after Blumenthal was sectioned, doctors diagnosed him with type one bipolar, the form of the condition that involves the most extreme manic episodes. Less than two years on, Blumenthal, now medicated, seems almost a different person. “I’ve gained a lot of weight,” he reflects, “and the speed of my voice now is way slower than it was.”
This is the terrain that My Life With Bipolar traverses for the first 45 minutes of its runtime. It poses two inseparable questions: how a condition as serious and life-altering as bipolar may have gone unrecognised for most of Blumenthal’s adult life, and if, or how, that condition may have affected or even fuelled his remarkable creative career. And it is remarkable: as the mastermind of restaurants such as Berkshire’s three-Michellin-starred The Fat Duck, Blumenthal concocted a multitude of bizarre, acclaimed dishes, from snail porridge to egg and bacon ice cream.
