You only live twice: Bond girl's painful journey to time renewed
An academic psychologist has joined forces with a former Bond girl and her film director husband to create a television documentary about the after-effects of brain injury.
In 2007, Maryam d'Abo had a near-fatal cerebral haemorrhage. Her husband Hugh Hudson, most famous for directing Chariots of Fire (1981), has now built a BBC Four film around her, Rupture: Living with My Broken Brain, which charts her "journey through pain and suffering to a life renewed".
The programme makers interviewed fellow aneurysm sufferers such as jazz guitarist Pat Martino and music producer Quincy Jones, as well as neurosurgeons.
But they also turned for help to Paul Broks, lecturer in psychology at Plymouth University and author of an award-winning book, Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology (2003).
"I got drawn into it quite gradually and ended up writing the voice-over, dispensing neurological facts and philosophical reflections," he said. "It was a journey, which I joined half-way through, and so I had to find words to work around the pictures in order to pull the programme together and give it coherence."
In the event, Dr Broks' words were recorded by the actor Nigel Havers and explore questions such as how the brain can be both "a piece of machinery" and "a site of hopes and fears", and why the academic finds it "hard to imagine a heavenly theme park" after death.
"My wife was terminally ill at the time so I didn’t want to shy away from the big issues of life and death," Dr Broks added.
"Even when I was working full-time as a clinician, I always felt there were deeper philosophical questions raised by the impact of brain injury, beyond the neurological and epidemiological facts."
Dr Broks was also keen to retain "an element of challenge and uncertainty", as when he asks Ms d'Abo whether the wheelchair dancers she is watching are really uplifting or just painfully embarrassing.
The programme will be broadcast on 12 July as part of BBC Four's season Flesh, Blood and Bone: The Amazing Human Body.
matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com
Readers' comments (1)
13 Jul 2012 7:59pm
I suffered a stroke a year ago at the age of 63. So I watched the program with intense interest and thought it was a splendid piece of sympathetic and informative reporting. A year later since the stroke I am no better but I can still look after myself. But I live in some degree of discomfort which seems to get slowly worse.There is a tendency to put on a brave face which might not make an unaffected onlooker fully aware of how potentially devastating strokes and brain damage can be to the sufferer. After all it's happened. It's life. So one tends to try and make the best of it. But it frightens me what may happen if I have another one and am then reduced from my present couch potato status to bed ridden cabbage needing intensive care. I am single man and live alone but have friends who visit me. But just as pregnant women have the right to seek an abortion, living people have the right to end their lives gracefully without the horrible thought of having to commit suicide as one day I might. I might botch the job and end up in a worse state. I would without doubt die in shame and not honour as I wish. It's my life. No one else's. I should have the right to do what I want with it. Why should someone impose on me their own views and say I have no right to end it. Just as women have won the right not have to give birth, the old and infirm should have the right to end their lives with dignity. I have no complaints. I have for 63 years until my stroke been so lucky to have lived a good life, working, cycling and loving and playing and I want now to at some stage let someone else take my place on this planet so that they too can hopefully enjoy what I have enjoyed. Is that so wrong? http://williamblessing.blogspot.co.uk/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01kpvwt/Rupture_Living_with_a_Broken_Brain/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbpointsofview/NF1951566?thread=8366878
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment