The television, if you’re not motivated by men’s football, is a dearth at the moment. So last night I travelled through Film 4 and BBC iPlayer looking for things to watch.
Yesterday, I felt that a programme about a stroke was a bit too much to put upon my wife, so we watched an Arena programme about comediennes French and Saunders. This evening, faced with similarly uninspiring broadcast television, I remembered that other programme in the Arena series that I noticed yesterday and permission was granted for us to watch. This is Arena - My Brain: After the Rupture
I can find the programme only on BBC iPlayer at the moment, which means that you need to be in the UK and pay for a TV licence to watch it. Let me tell you a bit about it, lest you wander into it unprepared.
This is a programme about Clemency Burton-Hill, a journalist, author, violinist, BBC radio music presenter and mum of two who in January 2020, while in New York, had a haemorrhagic stroke and was taken to Mount Sinai West hospital for a craniotomy and subsequently, I think, had stereotactic radiotherapy for a brain AVM. The programme shows her struggle with recovery through perhaps 2020 to 2023, up to the point that her second book was published.
I think it shows an incredibly difficult partial recovery over that time, with all of the frustrations, anguishes and sense of loss about who she used to be, what she used to be able to do and whether she would ever get close to being able to play the violin successfully again.
Spoiler alert: the programme doesn’t answer that question.
It does show much of the frustration that lies ahead for those who have a rupture, for those who have to ignore the ticking bomb during recovery from radiotherapy, and especially for those of us who used to have the remarkable dexterity that is required to be a concert violinist. It is a hard programme to watch. It is obviously a useful programme for some people: I think some communion with others who have found the process of recovery to be so f**king hard and slow and incomplete. (The f-word populates the soundtrack percussively, so do expect some candid frustration.)
The programme is available to licence payers in the UK for at least the next 12 months.