In the UK, it is estimated that some 1.3 million people have bipolar disorder – more than have dementia. The statistics are presumably much the same in Ireland and yet the condition remains taboo and largely undiscussed. For that reason, it never occurred to celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal that he might have the disorder when he began to experience manic episodes several years ago. While he suspected he was neurodivergent, the word “bipolar” never crossed his mind.
How little he knew, he says in the gripping and gruelling Heston: My Life with Bipolar (BBC Two, Thursday 8pm) – until the episodes became severe, and in late 2023, he hallucinated that he had a gun. This was in France, where he lives with his wife, the French entrepreneur Melanie Ceysson. “I was trying to fight my way out of it. Two people held my arms down,” he says. “I was struggling a lot. Then I saw the doctor pull out this whacking great syringe.”
Eighteen months later, Blumenthal is on a heavy regime of medication that has led to weight gain and resulted in his speech slowing down to a meditative not-quite-slur. He hasn’t had any more of the extreme shifts in mood and energy that are a signature of bipolar disorder. And yet there this isn’t quite a happy story with a happy ending. One of the themes of this fascinating and admirably honest film is his fear that the drugs that have stabilised his mind may have snuffed out the creativity that drove him in his early career.
As foodies will know, Blumenthal was at the cutting edge of the cutting edge as proprietor of the Fat Duck restaurant in Bray (a village in Berkshire rather than the Irish seaside town, as I was disappointed to discover after many years of assuming Wicklow was at the white-hot frontline of gastronomic innovation). Snail porridge, bacon and egg ice cream – he was the master of the non sequitur menu.
Blumenthal had long suspected his brain was different. He compares the zing of inspiration to a drizzle of sweets pitter-pattering down on his head. In 2023, the downpour became a deluge, and he was overwhelmed. Looking back, it is obvious he was hurtling towards a crash. However, he had been too blinded by success to recognise the danger signs.
“I ended up becoming a hamster on a wheel. I self-medicated with cocaine. I didn’t realise I was self-medicating at the time. I was absolutely self-medicating. I knew I had a busy head. I didn’t know if it was more busy than other people’s heads,” he says. “I looked up if I was autistic. I didn’t even think about bipolar.”
In one painful scene, he is shown a TV interview he gave shortly before his breakdown. The journalist says hello, and Blumenthal, dialling in over Zoom, embarks on a 10-minute stream-of-consciousness monologue. It’s as if every nerve ending in his brain is firing at once, and it’s all coming straight out of his mouth. “I want to put the inside-out back into the outside-in. I want to put the being back into the human,” he says. The interviewer smiles nervously. “He’s asked me one question,” says Blumenthal today. “‘How are you? That’s it.”
A more self-involved celebrity would make it all about themselves. To his credit, Blumenthal moves on from his own struggles to address the failure of the British health service to meet the needs of those who are bipolar. He calls on the mother of Rebecca McLellan, a paramedic from Ipswich who died by suicide after being denied the medical care she required. In another moving scene, Blumenthal meets his son Jack, who talks about how difficult it was to be around his father. “We’d plan it three weeks in advance, getting prepared just to see you for half an hour,” says Jack, who now runs his own restaurant. “And there was nothing I could do to help you.”
Blumenthal’s face crumples, and he struggles to hold back tears. “I’m sorry,” he says. It is one of many hugely emotive sequences in a documentary that bravely traces the chef’s journey from denial to diagnosis. Its most significant achievement is that, just a few minutes in, the viewers begins to see Blumenthal not as a famous foodie in fancy spectacles – but a vulnerable individual who desperately needs support.
