John Davidson became ‘poster boy for Tourettes’ as a teenager after this BBC documentary

John Davidson’s life was changed for the better when, at 16-years-old, the BBC first pointed a camera at him for the half-hour documentary John’s Not Mad, which explored his life living with severe Tourette’s syndrome in a small Scottish town. 

More than three decades of relentless advocacy work later, at this year’s Baftas, the country looked again — and this time, the spotlight offered a harsh glare. 

Davidson was attending the ceremony where biographical drama, I Swear, about his life and diagnosis had been nominated for six awards, including Best Actor, which Robert Aramayo won for his portrayal of Davidson.

During the evening, John experienced a series of tics, including coprolalia, echolalia and sudden physical movements. Among them was the N-word, shouted while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage presenting.

The BBC did not cut the language from the broadcast, despite the show being pre-recorded. 

The fallout was immediate, with many arguing that the outburst reflects John’s beliefs, while others blamed the broadcaster for failing in their duty of care.

Davidson apologised the next day, saying he was ‘deeply mortified if anyone considers my involuntary tics to be intentional or to carry any meaning.’ 

He described a ‘wave of shame’ and stressed that the most offensive word he uttered was one he would ‘never use’ and would ‘completely condemn’ if he did not have Tourette’s. ‘It’s the last thing in the world I believe,’ he said, emphasising that his tics are ‘not an intention, not a choice and not a reflection of my values’.

Lindo later said he and Jordan ‘did what we had to do’ on stage, but added that he wished ‘someone from Bafta spoke to us afterward’. 

Bafta has since issued an ‘unreserved apology’ for the ‘very offensive language’ broadcast, acknowledging the trauma such words carry and accepting responsibility for putting guests in a difficult position.

There are no easy answers to an incident like this, and it goes without saying that no presenter should have to hear a racial slur directed from the auditorium and no viewer should be blindsided by it at home. 

But there is also the question Davidson has posed himself: why, given his well-documented symptoms, was he seated near an active microphone, and why, in a pre-recorded ceremony, was the footage not edited? Could the ceremony have done more to ensure the comfort and safety of all involved? 

These are all meaningful questions, but regardless of the conclusions, watching the 1989 documentary John’s Not Mad makes it clear that the Bafta’s moment is painfully cyclical.

When it aired in 1989 as part of the BBC’s Q.E.D. strand, it introduced viewers to a teenager from Galashiels whose Tourette’s syndrome was so severe he was often too frightened to leave the house.

The programme opened by noting that the condition had once been mistaken for a kind of madness. Spend time with John, it promised, and you would see that John was not mad.

What they saw was a boy in visible torment. ‘Sometimes it’s so bad I just want to kill myself,’ he says early in the film. ‘It’s like someone’s forcing it out of me.’

In one of the most distressing sequences, he presses his hands tightly over his mouth in an attempt to stop the obscenities escaping. The narrator explains that he ‘buttons his lip, almost literally, in an attempt to keep the offending words private instead of public’. The effort is exhausting to watch.

The film makes clear that while the jerks and shouts are clearly involuntary to passerby, the content of his vocal outbursts often appears linked to whatever is happening around him, in a way that makes people question if its truly out of John’s control. 

As an adolescent, much of it is sexual; in one scene he struggles not to call his mother a slut. Later, he reacts to a teacher’s mistake with an insult he cannot hold back, and he is essentially unable to be around young girls without using distressing language. 

But as the documentary makes clear, the taboo nature of the outbursts is symptomatic of the disorder, and is by no means a reflection on John’s character.

An eminent neurologist, Oliver Sacks, observes that Davidson’s manifestation of Tourette’s is particularly socially disruptive, which distresses John, thereby making the tics worse because the disorder feeds on sufferers’ agitation. 

The film also documents the collateral damage of living around so much ignorance about the disorder. He is teased at school, locked in a cupboard by a teacher for disrupting class, and sometimes left to eat lunch alone. 

‘Sometimes it feels like everyone hates you because you got this,’ he says quietly in one moment. ‘You feel like everyone hates you.’ 

The documentary reveals that John’s father refuses to sit at a dinner table with his son. His mother absorbs the strain as relatives suggest that maybe demonic possession is to blame. 

In one truly haunting sequence, John’s mother, a stoic, soft-spoken woman who is a professional nurse, says of John’s disorder’s effect on her marriage: ‘It put a great strain on us to the point where we were ready to break up because of my husband’s attitude to it. 

‘He tended to go and drink instead of deal with this. And I don’t blame him if I could have done something like that, you know, to escape it.’

In 1989, that hour of television transformed John’s life. According to a BBC News article from 2009, neighbours who had shunned him began congratulating him on his bravery, and he later said it felt as if he had proved he ‘wasn’t mad’ and ‘wasn’t a freak’, but someone with a medical condition. Overnight, he became a spokesman for Tourette’s – effectively its public face in the UK. 

In recent years, however, he has expressed concern that the documentary also helped entrench a misconception: that Tourette’s is primarily about swearing, when coprolalia affects only a minority. 

The Baftas controversy cruelly reinforces that anxiety. After decades spent widening understanding of a complex neurological disorder, he is again reduced to the most taboo word his brain could produce.

None of this erases the harm of racist or homophobic language, nor the right of presenters and guests to feel protected from hearing it. Bafta has issued an unreserved apology for the ‘very offensive language’ broadcast, but the damage is already done. 

Indeed, it’s impossible not to wonder why the broadcaster felt it was necessary to edit the director of My Father’s Shadow, Akinola Davies Jr, acceptance speech, in which he said ‘Free Palestine,’ but not necessary to edit out the shouted slur. 

But regardless of which failures led to this controversy, the Baftas incident is particularly tragic because it lands on old fault lines outlined in John’s Not Mad. 

Davidson has explained that his tics are often triggered by what he sees or hears, meaning they can latch onto whatever is most charged in the environment, and explained to Variety that at the ceremony, he uttered ‘perhaps 10 different offensive words’. 

The most taboo word in the room – the one carrying the greatest historical weight  – is, neurologically, precisely the kind of word Tourette’s may seize upon.

For decades, Davidson has tried to separate himself from the content of his tics. ‘It’s like someone’s forcing it out of me,’ he said as a teenager. This week, he said his tics have ‘absolutely nothing to do with what I think, feel or believe’. The throughline is consistent.

What has changed is the scale of amplification. In 1989, the BBC used a camera to help Britain see that Tourette’s was a neurological disorder, not a moral failing. In 2026, the BBC broadcast his most offensive tic, unedited, to millions – effectively reigniting the very conflation he has spent his life resisting: that the word equals the man.

The tragedy is not only that presenters were placed in an unacceptable position, nor only that viewers heard language that should have been caught. 

It is that a man who once held his own mouth shut in desperation is, once again, defined by words he has spent a lifetime insisting are not who he is. 

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