Well, what with Ellen MacArthur coming into Falmouth and Graeme Obree's
film this evening I've watched more television today than I did in the
whole month of January.
The Obree programme: clearly put together with a very small budget, and
covering ground which anyone who's read his autobiography knows, it was
nevertheless very well presented and very sensitive. There was a lot of
talking heads, and not all of them were well identified. Chris Boardman
was very generous about Obree, describing him as '...better than
me...'; there were people from his cycling club; and there was someone
who I don't think was every identified who may have been a
psychiatrist, who spoke very thoughtfully about Graeme and what drives
him.
The bare outline of the facts of his life were reasonably presented, but
the programme suffered here from being too short (only 25 minutes in
total). Relatively little was made, I thought, of how badly he was
treated by the UCI. There was a lot of good library footage of the
various record attempts and successes. There was a little bit about Old
Faithful, but not nearly enough for anyone interested in bikes
technically.
But the core of the piece was was Graeme himself, partly out on various
bikes but mainly head to camera, sitting in an old battered red leather
chair in his workshop surrounded by bikes and bits of bikes. He was, as
in his autobiography, fiercely, painfully, nakedly honest - and honest
about his illness. The subtext of the whole piece was I think at least
partly him trying to say to other uptight Scottish hard men like
himself that it's OK to have mental illness, it's OK to admit to it,
and it is possible to live with it, if not to conquer it.
Good piece, well worth watching. You sassenachs should raise a stushie
to get it on your TV.
Oh, and his conclusion: "The world _is_ surreal. It's not me that's
crazy, the world _is_ crazy. You just have to go with the flow."
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[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
;; better than your average performing pineapple