ITV’s Jeremy Paxman documentary about his Parkinson’s was moving – but why do celebrities do them?

This week, Paxman: Putting Up with Parkinson’s on ITV was very moving – we gave it four stars. Jeremy Paxman candidly talked about his struggles coming to terms with having the disease, saying he feels “beaten and dejected” by Parkinson’s, but he doesn’t want to feel pitied.

It’s the first time Paxman has spoken about it since he was formally diagnosed 18 months ago. The University Challenge presenter also spoke about his decision to step down from hosting the quiz show due to his condition, revealing his last ever episode will be filmed next week [15 Oct].

It was sad – many viewers were moved to tears. He talked about being on antidepressants and also spoke to Sharon Osbourne, whose husband Ozzy suffers from the disease.

We ran news stories about it – how Paxman took part in an embarrassing ballet class to help Parkinson’s sufferers or how he discovered he had the disease after a doctor noticed signs of the presenter’s Parkinson’s on University Challenge.

It’s not the first of its kind. Good Morning Britain presenter Kate Garraway’s Caring for Derek on ITV earlier this year also left viewers sobbing. It is being shortlisted for a National Television Award. It’s not about her own illness but that of her husband Derek Draper, who has undergone a long health struggle after he was hospitalised with Covid.

Most moving of all was the Cruel Intentions star Selma Blair’s 2021 documentary film Introducing – a deeply intimate portrait of the actor after she’s diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a condition that affects the brain and often the spinal cord. We’ve also had Lady Gaga crying her eyes out in her 2017 Netflix documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two about having fibromyalgia, a condition that causes pain all over the body.

Justin Bieber is open about battling his mental health issues, drug addiction and Lyme disease in the 10-part YouTube docuseries Seasons, in 2020. Taylor Swift talks about her eating disorder in Netflix’s revealing 2020 documentary Miss Americana. Also that year, This is Paris included Paris Hilton’s revelation that she had been abused as a child at a Utah boarding school for troubled teens.

I’m not sure why celebrities do it, though. Is it to help others – certainly it must do. Or is there an element of wanting to be liked – to raise your popularity? A need to share trauma in order to not feel so alone? Perhaps it’s a desire not to be forgotten? To sell more records?

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For Lady Gaga, she says she felt “liberated” coming out about her pain because “it’s exhausting to feel like you have to hide things about yourself”. But even she understands that at the end of the day, we have a morbid fascination with somebody who is sick and famous. “Look, the truth is that there’s a fair amount of reality to the fact that some people really relish in the pain of famous people,” Lada Gaga told the LA Times.  “There’s an element of humiliation, like we’re just court jesters.”

Yours,

Charlotte Cripps

Senior culture writer