You have to accept Broadmoor holds a ghoulish fascination.
I've had my own troubles with mental health, and have seen doctors, nurses, therapists and many blister packs of pills. So I consider that I have an enlightened approach to mental health matters, knowing that circumstances can drive the best of us down into illness, and few are immune.
But even I felt the grim allure of Broadmoor (ITV) where the cameras would be allowed behind those high Victorian walls for the first time. We'd walk down the squeaking corridors, push open the bolted doors of the cells, listen to the prisoners talk of madness and maybe get a glimpse of The Yorkshire Ripper.
Truly, the macabre spirit of those 18th century Londoners who'd promenade through Bedlam was with me. I was gripped by the cheap thrill of peeking inside an asylum and forgot everything I'd learned about mental health. I was reduced to a popcorn-munching gawper. Show me the Ripper!
I soon saw how wrong I was. Those held in Broadmoor are patients, not prisoners. It's a hospital, not a jail. They're in wards, not cells. They're people, not 'rippers'.
The programme's structure mirrored my epiphany. It started off by playing to the frightening reputation of Broadmoor by showing us the hospital from the outside. Its exterior confirms all our ugly prejudices: it's a huge, imposing Victorian building, the ultimate 'lunatic asylum'. Its high brick walls are surrounded by fencing and laced with wire. CCTV is everywhere. Screams are heard. The stage is set: this is a frightening place. This is where Peter Sutcliffe lives.
Then this image was skilfully dismantled. We went inside and the interior looked like any other NHS hospital, with its faded pastel colour scheme and information posters on the wall. There was a canteen and a sweet shop. A patient sketched Brad Pitt whilst another played the keyboard in his room. The gym hall was decorated with flags and a Labrador ran around. Someone recited a poem.
So we were presented with the forbidding exterior, and our own assumptions about the place, then we were shown the softer interior and the creative therapies, but this was not a sympathetic look at Broadmoor. The director didn't shy away from presenting reality, and there was plenty of footage of staff gathering to restrain screaming, kicking patients. There was one particularly disturbing sequence where a team assembled outside a cell door, careful, tense and prepared, just because a patient wanted a drink. We were not told who this patient was but it was clear he was dangerous. Everyone stood ready. The door was carefully opened and a plastic cup placed just beyond the threshold, then the orderly jumped back and the door was slammed and bolted. It was impossible not to think of feeding time at the zoo. Yet, elsewhere, care was taken to chip away at the frightening position Broadmoor holds in the public imagination. This was invaluable in helping get rid of the stigma which still surrounds mental illness.
The programme also allowed patients to tell their own stories. There was no member of the elite medical profession stepping in to explain or interpret; they spoke to the camera themselves (though their faces were blurred). One man said he was paranoid and violent and felt the awful need to attack people to fend off the assault he always thinks is coming. He'd cut his own throat and his arms were criss-crossed with plum-coloured scars.
A number of patients said they'd been in care and sexually assaulted as children. One recalled the day his mother left him with a social worker, and how she abruptly walked out of the room, telling him, 'you're not coming with me.'
A psychiatrist's case study might have been more eloquent but these testimonies were raw and true and kicked against the stereotype of the Broadmoor patient as being 'mad', 'loony' or 'evil'. These people had very clearly been damaged at an early age and, as the Clinical Director made clear, there is no such thing as inherent evil. Arguably, a 'perfect storm' brews in some children's lives, throwing them into the path of abusive families or rapist carers. It would be a safe bet to say the majority of Broadmoor patients didn't spring from kind and loving middle-class families.
Peter Sutcliffe was from a relatively happy family but perhaps life just throws up horrific anomalies and the only place for him is deep inside a secure hospital but it's worth thinking of the many other patients in Broadmoor who were once children being held down, drugged and assaulted in the care of the state. Now they're back in the care of the state.
A Broadmoor nurse said he could point to a youngster caught in one of these 'perfect storms' and say, with sadness, 'yes, I'll be seeing you in a couple of years'.
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