First question: “Was John Taylor from Duran Duran your first ever crush?” Answer: “I thought he was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen, man or woman. His hair was like a miracle.” And so begins The Assembly, in which 35 autistic, neurodivergent and learning disabled people quiz one Michael Sheen, the award-winning Welsh actor. I think we can safely assume in more than three decades of interviews that Sheen has never been asked whether he knows “anything about the long-term celebrity Tom Jones?” It’s a question that leads to an anecdote about Sheen bonding with the Welsh singer’s sister over a broken toe in hospital in LA. You won’t find this sort of thing in Sight and Sound magazine.
I love the concept of this special, which airs during Autism Acceptance Week at a time when diagnosis is increasing and support has never been more stretched. The Assembly is simple and profound. I say this as the parent of a 10-year-old autistic boy who asks me about 100 questions a day, the revolving top two of which this week are: “Can we go skiing?” (we’ve never been) and “are you wearing tights?” (a sensory thing). My son loves to ask highly specific questions as much as neurotypical people in positions of power love to evade them. As for answering them? Not so much. He didn’t, indeed couldn’t, answer questions for years. He still answers very few, and finds open-ended ones especially overwhelming, incomprehensible, meaningless – or perhaps has entirely another feeling about them that I don’t yet understand.
