Heston: bipolar and a question of consent

The chef, his wife, his illness – and a BBC documentary

Cooking up a mental storm? Blumenthal after his bipolar diagnosis. [Image: BBC]

I’m not a great one for food programmes on the telly. I prefer to eat and/or cook than to look at pictures of other people cooking and eating.

But, in spite of this, I did briefly catch something of innovative chef Heston Blumenthal on a TV programme some years ago. I don’t remember much of it other than I believe he was serving some people who were in ‘the biz’, and the presentation of at least one of his dishes involved a swirl of dry ice and some sleight of hand that, visually, things weren’t quite as they seemed.

So clearly there was some showmanship and flamboyancy on display, and I remember an energy to his delivery – both in how he delivered the food to the grateful recipients, and how he presented himself.

Hence, it was, frankly, shocking to hear his slow, faltering vocal delivery on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme a couple of weeks ago. He was promoting a TV documentary about his bipolar disorder, diagnosed in the wake of a massive personal crisis over the condition which came to a head in November 2023.

He really sounded like he’d been through the wars, poor sod, and came across as very medicated.

Heston: My Life With Bipolar is on BBC iPlayer (limited access outside the UK). And it seemed to prove my hunches about how he came across on Today; viewers can see first-hand something of his complex medical regime – with a degree of irony we see him work his way through loads of pill-popping.

Please note: this article refers to suicide, albeit from a prevention perspective. It is not intended for children without a carer’s supervision, or anyone who is particularly vulnerable at this time. It could, I believe, be helpful for people with mild to moderate mental health conditions and their carers, friends, and family, as well as for a general readership.

A question of consent

I’ve written in a previous Substack post about my own experience of what I believe to have been bipolar disorder in my teens and my struggle to get a proper diagnosis as an adult.

The link is below… ⤵️ Join me again … after the break!

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Welcome back.

There was an additional shock of seeing Blumenthal in the documentary, as well as having heard him on the radio: sadly, something of the sparkle in his eye is dimmed, as is his whole demeanour.

This is complicated, because there’s no point longing for the effervescent, younger Blumenthal – with hindsight it appears that at least some and maybe a lot of what made him ‘watchable’ was actually mania.

In an interview for the Observer in March of this year (here) Heston talks about sleeping in his restaurant in ‘20-minute bursts, “usually curled up on the restaurant’s pile of dirty laundry”’ on a day when he could have been up at 5am and still food prepping by 2am the following morning.

He describes that kind of regime as ‘“On a good day”’. Now you might say that’s a slip of the tongue or just a turn of phrase, but there are other slips both in that newspaper interview and in the BBC documentary that give me cause to question whether he was well enough to give his consent – that is, meaningful ‘informed consent’ in the phrase – to take part.

And on top of these things he is now an ambassador for the charity Bipolar UK.

In the documentary Heston’s asked, ‘What impact did your manic highs have on your children?’ Disturbingly he answers that he doesn’t know, ‘because I haven’t asked them’.

Reasons to be fearful

Let me say straight away here, for legal reasons if nothing else, I don’t doubt for a moment that Blumenthal has signed all the necessary forms for the BBC (and/or any other production company or third parties involved in the broadcast material) and the Observer (the interview was conducted when it was still a part of the Guardian group), as well as the charity.

But one of the traits of bipolar, certainly in a manic episode, is a lack of self-awareness.

I know this from personal experience, although by its very nature, such knowledge only percolates up into your consciousness once the episode’s over. I eventually worked out that I wasn’t the Son of God, and that a new wing of Watford General Hospital wasn’t being specially built for me in 1982.

So when in the documentary Heston’s asked, ‘What impact did your manic highs have on your children?’ he answers that he doesn’t know, ‘because I haven’t asked them’.

This gives us a heart-rending encounter with his son, who talks of having to prepare emotionally – alongside his other siblings – for a meeting with his father three weeks in advance for the half hour Heston spared, only to have any hopes dashed because Heston wasn’t listening to his kids and wasn’t really ‘with’ them.

And that, of course, strongly speaks to Blumenthal senior’s routine (physical) absenteeism from parenthood, as well as an emotional absence even when he was around.

Now, if I was a documentary maker I would think an apparent on-camera reconciliation such as this one – there is a resolution of sorts – is visual gold dust. And it was certainly gripping telly.

But the more reflective side of me says the situation screams that Heston is still very unwell: assuming he’s giving an honest answer to producer/director Joe Myerscough’s question, he appears:

1. Either not to have given any thought to years of his lack of care for his children (notwithstanding that the three he had by his first wife are now adults)

2. Or, perhaps he has previously thought about it but can’t access the memory of that at the point in the programme when he’s quizzed about it

3. Or you might say it’s too early in his recovery for him to have got round to questions such as these.

But whichever of those positions is the case – or any others I may have omitted – I find it concerning.

I’m not saying that from a lofty position of judgment – I don’t have children, so I hold no brief for parental superiority. What I mean is that sufficient self-awareness seems to be lacking which suggests to me that Heston, sadly, is still in the grip of the illness.

And so that nagging question of consent returns.

Hero

It seems that his second wife Melanie was the hero of the hour. Yes, she took some respite from the crisis at one point by going to visit her parents – it seems she will have endured weeks, if not months, of the building crisis by then – but she did ultimately organise her husband’s being ‘sectioned’, i.e., being forcibly taken to hospital for his own safety.

There’s plenty to laud in the programme. For instance, we learn from a BBC journalist, Chloe Hayward, that more people have bipolar in the UK than dementia. (Although since she goes on to say the NHS can’t give figures for bipolar, it’s not clear how reliable that figure is.)

And a programme which raises awareness of this serious disease – footage of a young woman begging a crisis service to help her and being refused and then hearing from her grieving mother about what followed is a tough watch – has to, overall, be a good thing.

But the show is, I think, surprisingly incurious about the roots of Heston’s illness. It’s from the Observer interview that I learned that he grew up being called ‘“useless and stupid”’ by his mother and that he lost her and his troubled sister in the same week.

And while it seems Blumenthal attempted to ‘self-medicate’ with cocaine, it seems unlikely – to say the least – that that will have helped.

The documentary does answer some questions and is definitely absorbing, but it raises plenty of unanswered questions, too.

Slightly tweaked on 2/7/25 to correct a couple of typos and for clarity