Abstract
“Let me just tell you what we saw last night out here. It was the Second Coming. It was not a meteorite. I am not the Messiah. I'm a Wise Man. And so are my family. We saw it coming. I am the Wise Man. Protect me. Jesus is coming to Greece to save Greece.”
These are the words of a mad man.
These are my words. Straight from my mouth; recorded on my camera on July 1, 2011 on the kitchen balcony of my rented house in the hills just north of Athens. I was filming myself because I was convinced the Second Coming had to be on television.
At that moment, I was certain I was at the apogee of my journalistic career. I knew precisely why I had been put on Earth. My career trajectory from local newspaper reporter to globe-trotting one-man-band videographer had been tailored to ensure I was on hand to make the most important film in history, the arrival of The New Messiah.
Utter deluded nonsense. In reality, what I was capturing for posterity was my personal disintegration and the juncture when my insanity stopped being private and became very public. The residents of our valley may recall their afternoon siesta being disturbed by a deranged Englishman bellowing at the top of his lungs, the day after a dramatic shooting star appeared in the Greek night sky.
Now my former neighbours and the rest of the world can watch this human car crash from the comfort of their own living rooms. The scene I describe above is, perhaps, the most dramatic in Malcolm is a Little Unwell, a feature-length documentary film which has taken seven years to compile, and which is now available on download platforms such as iTunes and Amazon.
The film had its premiere at the Cambridge Film Festival last autumn, where the audience awarded it 4.8 out of five possible stars. It has had consistent five-star reviews on the download sites. Robin Lustig, the much-respected former World Service and The World Tonight presenter, not given to hyperbole, called it “searing, moving and unforgettable”.
My Kafkaesque journey into madness began when I was the BBC's stringer in Athens. Not for the first time, I had fallen out of favour with the boss class in London and my earnings followed me over the cliff. In order to put moussaka on the table, I did something I'd never contemplated before: public relations work for the UN children's fund.
I was due to go to West Africa to do a series of films about child soldiers, but it would have been impossible to enter Ivory Coast without a yellow fever shot and a certificate to prove it. The nurse told me I could expect flu-like symptoms, but nothing worse.
Within 18 hours of receiving the vaccine, I was burning up. For 13 days I had a near-fatal fever hovering around 40-41C. I didn't sleep for six days and by the time the fever was brought under control, I was hallucinating.
With huge prescience, my journalist wife Trine Villemann, best known for her exposés about the Danish royal family, began documenting my behavioural changes with the rudimentary HD camera on her iPod. I was convinced I was in touch with the ghosts of good friends, who were giving me guidance about how to prepare the world for the Second Coming.
Just over two weeks after being injected, I was in a psychiatric clinic in Greece. It was the start of a 15-month cycle of insanity, incarceration in secure wards, recovery, relapse and repeated detention.
We ran out of money. I couldn't continue my freelance gig in Greece. My wife and 12-year-old son Lukas ended up in a crime-ridden ghetto way off the tourist grid in Copenhagen on Danish social benefits, while my alter ego flipped from being Christ to the Devil, which really was hell.
All of this is in the movie.
After watching it, my friend Gabriel Borrud from Deutsche Welle wrote: “Jesus, man, you truly let the world look at your soul when it was severed. Nobody ever does that like this.”
Why expose myself so totally?
As journalists, we expect the subjects of our assignments to reveal their deepest emotions at times of their greatest despair. Mine is a hell of a story. How could I not reciprocate?
I'll be honest. This is also a commercial venture to try to compensate for the absence of any financial atonement from the vaccine manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur.
But Trine and I do have two altruistic motives. One is to destigmatise mental illness.
The second is to try to compel Sanofi Pasteur to upgrade the potent live virus cocktail pumped into millions of the world's poorest people each year. We don't want any other family to suffer the way we have.
Nothing would have given us greater pleasure than to have posed all the difficult questions to Sanofi in a civilised interview. But the company policy is to hide behind carefully worded statements denying culpability, expressing crocodile tears sympathy, and saying that vaccines are often blamed for medical mishaps, when in fact the timing is just coincidence.
What they were saying is that I became demented all by myself.
Every doctor who treated me, from the first to the last, blamed the vaccine for my madness. The fever that followed the injection loosened the pegs tethering the tent that was my brain, and then a gale came along and blew it away. One psychiatrist explains in the film that the vaccine was like the first stone in an avalanche.
What also makes our documentary a solid piece of journalism is that we have Sanofi's innovations director Ronald Neeleman admitting on camera at a conference that the company hadn't upgraded the vaccine since the 1960s, because there was no financial incentive so to do. In terms of corporate own goals, it's up there with the jeweller Gerald Ratner talking about his products being crap.
Do I feel sorry for my lot? No. We have climbed out of the abyss. But we are struggling financially. However, as I write this, my colleagues at the PBS Newshour in Washington DC are preparing to transmit my latest news feature about a remarkable young man called Alex Lewis who caught a common cold, which turned into sepsis. Within months, he had lost all four limbs and his lips.
My sanity returned. Permanently. Meeting Alex gave me a much-needed sense of perspective. Suffering is relative.