Just finished reading Stan Collymore’s autobiography, Stan: Tackling My Demons. I was interested because of an interview with him that I’d read a couple of years ago in which he talked very articulately about his struggle with clinical depression. He came across as open and intelligent, and it made me want to read the full story.
I’m glad I did. However much we want to pretend that we’re not interested in celebrity culture, we can’t escape it. My mind is filled with as much tabloid pulp as the next person’s, it’s unavoidable. So reading this book filled in an awful lot of background on people and events that I thought I knew about and understood, and made me realise that there’s a lot to be said for taking the trouble to get behind the headlines, precisely to give some depth to the shallows.
As an avid Davina McCall fan (never more so than when she handled Nicky’s friday night eviction with so much humanity and grace) I was delighted to find that Davina comes out of Stan’s autobiography as a complete angel, a wonderfully humane, intelligent, non-judgemental and supportive person who was at the end of a phone during the worst moment’s of Stan’s depressions & spats with the tabloids.
At the end of the book, you feel as if the pair of them have paid an enormous price to know how to become a real three-dimensional human in a fake two-dimensional world, and that’s a lesson worth reading about.
