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Tourettes: I swear I can sing, The observer
(This is England 88) It came, rightly, with a naughty-words warning; it wasn't for the faint-hearted. More confusing was the same warning before Tourettes: I Swear I Can Sing. What else were we going to get in a programme about Tourette syndrome?
Actually, it turns out that assumption was wrong. One of the things we learned in this mesmerising documentary is that all Tourette syndrome sufferers do so differently. Some just "tic", give involuntary gestures. Others with this nasty untreatable neurological condition, which can suddenly strike later in life, both tic and speak, or yelp, involuntarily; and others do so not just involuntarily but inappropriately; but all are different. Lovely Ruth Ojadi had it bad. Under control, though it took tense work, she was lucid, kind and funny. When it slipped its leash – when she felt unsure, or with strangers, whose gaze she knew she was helplessly drawing – it was grim to watch. It wasn't just the swearwords, it was the inappropriateness; her syndrome's ability to search her brain for the least, least sayable words in any situation. Thus, in the supermarket, "Oh Jesus don't let me be fat," she shouted, passing a fat man. Seeing an Arab, she blurted: "Jihad!" Catching sight of a lone man walking in a park, she yelled "paedo". It was like watching Jeremy Clarkson going shopping. I can joke, because Ruth did. She giggled at her need to shout her pin number while keying it at the checkout. Explaining her urge to "fill the silence of any commute" with shouts and tics, she then added, casually: "And as for when I'm driving!" and there was an impish glee at film-maker Danny Beck's presumed nanosecond of shock. Oh, she was lovely Also, crucially, a damned fine voice. Ruth had been studying music before the growing severity of TS forced her out. Here, she slowly found the confidence to rediscover singing again, and newly discover that, for the three minutes she had control of the song, she had control of the syndrome. This fine film culminated in her performing beautifully at an open mic gig, hardly a tic in sight. Wisely, unexploitatively, Beck chose not to linger on the resulting tumult of applause, because otherwise, Pavlov-conditioned as we are now to weep at the sight of an average teen with nothing worse to overcome than a bad haircut holding a note for two seconds, I would have been sobbing mad salt tears of my own blubber. Euan Ferguson