Heston Blumenthal’s BBC documentary My Life with Bipolar ought to be a wake-up call

Celebrity chef opens up about being sectioned in this one-off programme that is most arresting when looking at the bigger picture

“How come it’s taken me until my 57th year of life to discover that I have bipolar?” asks Heston Blumenthal, in the sobering new BBC Two documentary Heston: My Life with Bipolar. The chef – whose radical culinary creativity made him one of the stars of this century’s global food scene – was only diagnosed with the condition in 2023, when police were called to his home in France. He was hallucinating and had lost contact with reality; after Blumenthal was sectioned, doctors diagnosed him with type one bipolar, the form of the condition that involves the most extreme manic episodes. Less than two years on, Blumenthal, now medicated, seems almost a different person. “I’ve gained a lot of weight,” he reflects, “and the speed of my voice now is way slower than it was.”

This is the terrain that My Life With Bipolar traverses for the first 45 minutes of its runtime. It poses two inseparable questions: how a condition as serious and life-altering as bipolar may have gone unrecognised for most of Blumenthal’s adult life, and if, or how, that condition may have affected or even fuelled his remarkable creative career. And it is remarkable: as the mastermind of restaurants such as Berkshire’s three-Michellin-starred The Fat Duck, Blumenthal concocted a multitude of bizarre, acclaimed dishes, from snail porridge to egg and bacon ice cream.

Early in the doc, he compares the creative fecundity of a manic state to being like a kid in a sweet shop: the roof opens above him, and sweets of every variety rain down around him. “That’s what it’s like in my head,” he says. (This image is literalised in the documentary, with talking-head interviews repeatedly broken up by superfluous – and rather on-the-nose – shots of Blumenthal in a confectionery downpour.)

My Life With Bipolar’s workmanlike approach to its subject matter is effective in spurts: we are shown clips of Blumenthal down the years, and cannot help but reframe them through this new lens of his diagnosis. (A 2021 TV interview, in which a visibly manic Blumenthal goes on a frenzied rant about life and the universe, is particularly shocking.) His intense and unhealthy business at the peak of his career may have exacerbated, or been exacerbated by, his condition – he speaks briefly about self-medicating with cocaine. “I ended up becoming a hamster on a wheel,” the chef muses. The most affecting moment may be a poignant filmed conversation between Blumenthal and one of his adult children, in which they discuss the toll his undiagnosed condition took on their relationship.

In its final section, however, the documentary opens up, and sees Blumenthal look into the country’s wider systems of diagnosis and treatment for bipolar. It’s the most interesting section of the programme, and the stats are damning: it often takes a decade to get a diagnosis, which can only be given by a psychiatrist. More people in the UK have bipolar than dementia, for instance, but resources for the former are fewer and harder to access. The number of people with bipolar who are taking their own lives is rising in the UK – in contrast to other countries, where that figure is falling.

Blumenthal also meets with the mother of a young woman with bipolar who died by suicide – a sequence that is as moving as it is infuriating. By the end, the programme has transformed into a call to action: it’s clear that drastic change is required. The issue is bigger than Blumenthal – and Blumenthal is big enough to acknowledge that.