Jeremy Paxman says he has “always been a troublemaker”, but, in aiming his curious eye and famously combative manner towards his own illness, rather than students or politicians, his troublemaking tendencies are just as effective. In Paxman: Putting Up With Parkinson’s (ITV) – it was going to be called Living With Parkinson’s, but Paxman scoffs and suggests that he is merely putting up with it – the presenter allows cameras to follow him from the period just after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, in April 2021, until the present, as he films his final series of University Challenge.
He is a wonderfully unsentimental documentarian, insisting that he is not participating in the film to elicit sympathy and refusing to be cajoled into “blubbing” on camera. His worst fear is that he will come across as suffering from “poor little me syndrome”. He has a journalistic interest in finding out more about practically everything, and so it stands to reason that he would try to find out all that he can about his own diagnosis. It makes for fascinating, grownup, unsparing television.
