The wildfire surrounding last week’s Bafta ceremony – where Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson involuntarily shouted a racial slur at actors Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo, and the BBC aired the moment – continues to rage. Criticisms have been levelled at, and investigations opened by, the Beeb and Bafta; hundreds of news stories and comment pieces have been devoted to the incident (if you read anything, make sure it’s this clear-eyed piece from Jason Okundaye, who was at the ceremony); and the climate on social media has been toxic, with much of the ire directed at Davidson himself. It’s an ire that is based on a complete misunderstanding of coprolalia, the form of Tourette syndrome (TS) that Davidson has, which results in the unintended and completely involuntary utterance of offensive or inappropriate remarks.
There’s an unhappy irony at play here because Davidson, arguably more than any other person in Britain, has been responsible for raising awareness of TS. There’s an unfortunate symmetry, too, to the fact that the incident was shown on primetime BBC, because that was where Davidson was first brought to national attention as the subject of the landmark 1989 documentary John’s Not Mad. Directed by film-maker Valerie Kaye, and aired as part of the popular science series QED, the half-hour film – available on DVD or to rent or stream on Prime Video – shadows a 15-year-old Davidson around his home town of Galashiels, in the Scottish Borders, as he struggles both with his condition and the intolerance of those around him (his own grandmother claimed that he was possessed by the devil).
It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of John’s Not Mad on public awareness. Though TS was first described a century before by the French neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette, attention paid to the condition was restricted to specialist medical journals. “It has been so little known that until recently few doctors had ever heard of it,” the Guardian’s first report on the condition in 1978 noted. That all changed with the documentary, broadcast at a time when the vast majority of the country only had access to four channels, and viewing figures were far higher. The broadcaster Ben Bailey Smith, who had just started secondary school at the time, remembered the documentary being “huge … Everyone in the playground was quoting him.”
That was, of course, the negative side of the documentary’s popularity: for Davidson, increased attention was often accompanied by ridicule. But the film, which opens with him admitting suicidal thoughts, is at pains to underscore the seriousness of TS – almost to a fault. At times it’s an unbearably sombre watch, particularly in comparison to Kaye’s follow-up The Boy Can’t Help It. Broadcast in 2002, that film catches up with Davidson, now in his late 20s, doing caretaker work in a community centre, and a strikingly different character from the anguished teen of the original film: thoughtful, charitable and full of humour. “I don’t mind it when people laugh with me,” he says at one point and later cheerfully recounts the challenges of playing hide and seek as a kid (“I was always the one shouting ‘I’m here’”).
By the time the 2009 follow-up documentary Tourette’s: I Swear I Can’t Help It aired, awareness had increased even further, thanks to Big Brother. Eight million viewers had watched Pete Bennett, who has TS, win the seventh series of the reality show in 2006, a victory that campaigners hailed as “the best PR job anyone could have done” for the condition. A whole suite of Tourette syndrome programming would be commissioned in its wake, from documentaries investigating its causes to a reality series that saw people with TS put on a variety show. Along with offering a more hopeful tone than early coverage of the condition had, many of these shows also avoided focusing solely on coprolalia – which only affects a small number of people with TS. Even so, people with the condition believe there is still too much of a media focus on its “most ‘extreme’ and ‘entertaining’ aspects”, as well as a “tragedy mindset” that doesn’t tally with reality.
I Swear, the terrific biopic of Davidson’s life – and the reason that he was attending the Baftas in the first place (the film was nominated for six awards and won two, including best leading actor for Robert Aramayo, who plays Davidson) – is hopefully another step away from those tropes and towards greater understanding of TS. Davidson, played with remarkable care by Aramayo, is never framed as a simple victim, but rather someone with agency, and the capacity to make mistakes. And the film follows Davidson’s own mantra about laughing with him – witness the scene where a teen with TS (played by an actor with the condition) and Aramayo’s Davidson embark on a flurry of offensive outbursts before nodding and laughing in shared recognition. Praised by reviewers and campaigners for its compassion and accuracy, the film has also enjoyed the sort of slow-building success that moderately budgeted British dramas weren’t thought to achieve any more. Hopefully a rare positive to come out of the Baftas incident and its aftermath will be that even more people see the film – from the vitriol Davidson has faced since the ceremony, it’s clear that plenty need to.
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