Shadow Dancer by Tom Bradby

Secret Service by Tom Bradby

CRAIG

Hello, and welcome to desperately seeking wisdom with me, Craig Oliver. This is a podcast for people who want to live a simpler, more fulfilled life, but aren't sure how to get there. A little while back, I hit the buffers. Outwardly, I had a successful life, but I wasn't happy. I couldn't see much point in anything. I rarely felt at peace and thought of life as a grind that I just had to get through. I realised I was far from alone, and wondered if there might be a different, better way.

So, for Desperately Seeking Wisdom, I've been talking to some wise people. People who've managed to change, or have had changed forced upon them. What was the wisdom that got them through it? What would they say that would help others who, like me, were struggling?

TOM

It really helps to develop a meaningful sense of fatalism in life. Now, that is not the same as saying you give up on trying to do the things you want in life, but we have a deluded sense about how much of our destinies we control.

CRAIG

My guest today is the journalist and TV presenter, Tom Bradby. I first met Tom when I was a trainee at ITN - and he was already making great strides in his career - becoming Ireland Correspondent at just 26 years old. He went on to become Asia correspondent, then Political editor, and Royal editor, and he’s currently the presenter of ITV News at Ten. In his spare time, he’s written 10 novels and several screenplays. But a few years ago, his life came off the rails, when he had a breakdown and was signed off work for 3 months with acute insomnia. He spoke to me about what led to his breakdown, and how he found a way to a more balanced life.

Rewind to your childhood. You know, tell me about that. What was it like? Um, you were an only child, I think and your dad was in the Navy, and -

TOM

Yeah, I was an only child, my dad was in the Navy s- it’s hard to imagine these days, I think, sometimes, you know. When we’re working at ITN, you know as well as I do, you go away on a trip and you’d have quite a long time off afterwards. You m- you go away on, let’s say there was a war or something, or a really bad situation. I remember covering the Kosovo war, I was away for like a month, or five or six weeks or something, and then I had quite a bit of time off when I came back.

You know, my dad was away for months and months, [LAUGHS] and months, like a year [At sea?] at sea, you know, he’d go away for a year and he’d be back for two weeks, you know, and that was a big deal. He was home for two weeks, that was exciting. So, my childhood was very privileged, I should say that. My par- I had lovely parents, they lavished me with love. I was an only child, my parents weren’t, you know, weren’t particularly, I don’t know that you’d call someone in the Navy rich but, you know, we were comfortable, and yeah, I, I had a really, really great childhood.

I think it was only later that I realised it was in s- some ways, quite peculiar, just because I spent inevitably a lot of time - I mean, I went away to boarding school, and so I was kind of very young, seven, and so I was sort of surrounded by kids in that regard, but still, when we were growing up, I used to sit and watch the test card, waiting for children’s TV to come on in the afternoon, [LAUGHS] because there - you know, and if you were, if you’d finished your book, well, you had to stare out the window or invent stories -

CRAIG

And, and I was talking to somebody about this last night, actually and they - we were saying that, you know, actually it was a weirdly kind of benign neglect, that you were often as a child, like, left to your own devices, and as you say, boredom was a big part of it, wasn't it?

TOM

Yes, and in mental health terms, that's very good for you, I think, because your body is in very low physiology, you're not stimulating yourself, you're not stressed by anything, necessarily. So you're staring out the window, drifting, and that is good for you as it turns out, and I think one of the reasons why mental health - there are probably lots of reasons why mental health problems are much, run at a much higher rate in the children of today than they did, certainly when I was growing up.

But one very significant one is that they are constantly stimulated and so they’re, you know, the whole day is a little dopamine hit, one after another, after another, and that's just not very good for your body's physiology, but when I was growing up, yeah, there were moments of adrenaline a day, usually moments you had to create for yourself, but there was a lot of staring out the window.

And actually, you know, um, my tenth novel is being published next May, and you know, I've written quite a lot of screenplays and everything as well and I - some - yeah, some people say, ‘Cor, how do you sit there, churning out all these stories?’ And it's like, it's no different from my childhood. That's what I did all day.

CRAIG

Was it exacerbated by the fact you were on your own?

TOM

Yeah, I mean, you can't - my mum was so good. She was always trying to get me out and doing stuff, but if you're an only child, and any only child listening to this will know this intrinsically, you just spend quite a lot of time on your own. You know, sometimes your parents are busy, and they've got other things to do. They're seeing friends, they've got work, they're doing stuff in the garden. Whatever it is, there are whole days when you're at home on your own, and you have to entertain yourself.

I mean, I don't think I really thought about this until - in fact, until quite w-well after I'd sort of started writing novels and films and stuff. It occurred to me, where did all that come from? Because I've always got a story in my head. You know, I finish a book and I'm thinking, ‘Oh, I'm, oh, I’ve got this idea for a film. I might start that’ and before I know it, I've half written it.

And everyone always says to me, ‘Where do you find the time?’ and it's honestly, it's - doesn't take me - it feels like it doesn't take me very long, ‘cos it's like, always in my head, like, something going and then suddenly I start writing and I've written pages and pages of it, and I, I do think that is because as a child, I sat there with many hours to fill. I mean, honestly, some of it was kind of pathetic.

You know, I used to go and play a football game against myself in the garden, or a rugby game, and then I used to come in and interview myself. [LAUGHS]

CRAIG

What, you saved your own shot?

TOM

I'd save my own shot, and then come in and [LAUGHS] and interview - it’s kind of sad, so tragic, isn't it? And then I would interview myself. Yeah, maybe that's why I ended up becoming a TV presenter. I was so -

CRAIG

Were you a tough interviewer?

TOM

I was a tough, I was a tough interviewer on myself.

CRAIG

That moment, though, when your dad came home after like, 10 months at sea, that must be quite odd because you. you must have been periods where you felt you didn't really know him and that you'd have to establish a relationship very quickly.

TOM

My dad was a lovely, very, very kind man, and I loved him dearly, but my mother was quite a sort of powerful character and she was a bit of a sort of forcefield behind me, really. I wrote on her gravestone, ‘A selfless force of nature’, which I felt was the best way to describe her, both because she was very selfless, like she was always kind of helping people, butut she was also a force of nature. She was, you know, she was, you know, if you stood in the face of her when she was in gale force mode, you definitely knew it.

CRAIG

You've achieved a lot in, you know, broadcasting, writing, you've done a lot of things. You've obviously got very high standards and it sounds like, when you're talking about your family and I would think, like there was an expectation that you would achieve, and that you would do well, and that, that you kept pushing yourself.

TOM

I think, just to answer the point about my dad, and I will come on to that, ‘cos the thing I was gonna say about my dad is that actually, when, when my mum died, there was almost like, wow, kind of who are you really? Because my mum had always sort of been this sort of forcefield between us, and actually, the one thing I was grateful of after - you know, I mean, I was terrible, my mum dying and there were - everything about it was bad.

But I did have four years with my dad afterwards, albeit that he, he wasn't very well and propping him up mentally and physically and psychologically was very hard and very draining, but I, I was grateful for that time, ‘cos I, I really did get to know him as a sort of individual on his own, which was kind of lovely.

On the expectation thing, I, I don't know, it's hard. I, you know, I'm sure, in fact I'm, I imagine that one of the reasons why I'm sitting here is because obviously, for anyone who doesn't know, I had a quite public breakdown a few years ago, and I had to go through a very intense signed off work three months from insomnia, and had to go through some intense psychological rebooting process.

Now, obviously, part of that is you, you're kind of examining your genetics, so, you know, it's impossible to do without going, as we are now, quite heavily over your family background, working out what - the first question was, was your mum anxious? Answer, no. My mum was like a storming force of nature. You know, 45 minutes later, I've worked out, well, yeah, actually, I guess she was. You know, she was anxious about what she might lose, and - that she loved and yeah it was -

CRAIG

Because you, there was one child, her fa- [Yeah] your father's away. [Yeah, yeah, yeah] Um, there’s a, there would have been, I mean, there would have been a lot of focus on you, and I was reading that you were saying, there was an expectation that you'd be a good rugby player and your school was chosen because specifically it was good at rugby, that kind of thing.

TOM

Yes. I mean, on the expectation - I mean, on the kind of loss thing, I mean, I think I - there was a - I had a great friend at prep school who was also called Tom, slightly weirdly, who was also slightly weirdly an only child, who, you know, one morning woke up and he had a terrible headache, and I said, ‘Well, you’d better go and see Matron’ and I - the last I saw of him, he was sort of tottering off down the corridor, and then he was dead by five o'clock from meningitis.

And I, I remember my mother, you know, I do remember at that time, like, her being very different around me, and I can still to this day remember the kind of shattering grief of his parents and, you know, as an eight-year-old boy, you're trying to process all this, and you don't know how to do it. But that, I think when I, when I was talking about that in the kind of psychiatric assessment process, that was when I realised that my mother had this aspect of her character that I hadn't really examined.

And that led to a kind of fairly long period of trying to kind of work out how much of my life that I'd spent sort of trying to control my own fate. But there was another piece which you're, you’re right, which was about, you know, the kind of, why do you put so much pressure on yourself to succeed? And yeah, and the psychiatrist was still kind of at one point was saying, ‘Well, when's enough? What's enough?’ You know, ‘What is it you want, you know, what is it you want? When’s it gonna get-’

CRAIG

And what was the answer?

TOM

Well, the answer was, yeah, probably feeling enough already, really, and I don't mean to sound self-congratulatory about that in any way, but it's just, you either go on and on pushing yourself, or you just say, ‘Well, I’ve, I've had a great run. Everything else is a bonus’, which is obviously a much psychologically healthier place, and it was.

In one sense, I suppose, working about this - out about this stuff about kind of my mother, and why it was that I had quite an exaggerated fear of loss, which is what, the primary driver of me disappearing over the cliff, was it was easier to work out that, than the kind of secondary element of pushing myself over the cliff, which had just been driving myself too hard.

Because to the, the standard, I think it's fair to say, psychological answer to that is somebody has a critical parent. If your parent is critical of you, and nothing you ever do is good enough, then you spend your whole life trying to prove yourself to this person who's never going to be satisfied, and we kind of ruled that out in minute one, ‘cos even at 10, my parents thought I was overdoing it.

And I, I found I did end up, after a lot of kind of work, trying to think it through, and maybe there's just an element of my character that is like this, but I sort of did end up focusing on you know, my grandfather had played rugby for England. I don't remember us ever, any discussion about what school I would go to other than whether it was the best rugby school in the area or the country.

And you know, that sort of intensely macho team sport where, you know, I would literally die in a

ditch for my teammates, and - but that, in a way, is a bit of what then becomes an over, more overarching thing, which is a sort of, I think there's a quite a typical private school thing, which is sort of middle class competitiveness, you know.

CRAIG

I sort of spent quite a lot of time looking at why had I pushed myself so hard, [Mm] and I sort of came to the conclusion that I actually, in my head, there was somewhere there was this assumption that if you push and push and push, eventually at some point you’ll sort of cross a line, and you'll be okay and you'll be happy, and everything will be okay, and people look at you and say, ‘Oh, well, he's achieved and he’s fine’ and you can sort of almost rest them. [Mm] And I sort of realised that there is no moment when that happens and not -

TOM

And what - yeah, but sorry to just stop you there for a minute. What was your explanation to yourself as to why you had that in the first place? [I think um-] Before you got to that realisation.

CRAIG

- huge amounts of stuff, you know, very, very difficult childhood, lots of issues that were unresolved that hadn't faced. I mean, I was interested in you saying about your friend dying [Mm]. One of the things that happened when I was a teenager was, I - just reminded me of, I went walking in the hills in Scotland quite a lot and we would, [Mm] we would mark off the Munros, which are the mountains there. And we went one, er, Christmas with a friend and his dad, and his dad's friend, and then suddenly just coming down the mountain, this guy just keeled over and died.

TOM

Oh my God!

CRAIG

And the person I was with, [Yeah] you know, was a doctor and he was just like, saying, ‘Look, there's nothing I can do. This, it’s, it's happened. He's had a massive coronary and there, there's nothing we can do’. And it was very weird situation. There was a blizzard and a white out, and we had to wait to get rescued, and all this sort of stuff.

But what was interesting actually, was afterwards it was a kind of like, people were like, ‘You alright?’ and like, ‘Yeah’ and then just get on with it, and then I found it weird, like, in the weeks and months afterwards, nobody really talked about it. [LAUGHS] If you [Yeah], you know, um, I suspect today there would be an endless, I would have been sent to a therapist and like, ‘Are you, are you okay?’ and that sort of thing, but that just, sort of stuff didn't happen.

And I kind of - that's one example, I think, of things that just sort of get pushed down and buried and you haven't really looked at or understood or processed, as you say, and it's only when something happens that you start looking back at that stuff.

TOM

But these internal, you know, you mentioned having a quite a difficult childhood and everything else. I mean, these internal process - thought processes in your head, and this is why, I guess I spend a lot of time thinking about mental health and mental, you know, the - my fundamental reason for doing this podcast is I spend a lot of my time, because I guess I became a bit of a poster boy for [LAUGHS] having a breakdown and losing control, people - one of the really nice things about is people feel able to come and talk to me about when they're not feeling well, and it just makes you realise, God, how many people out there are suffering and need help.

And my fundamental reason for doing conversations like this is you think, ‘Well, if I can even help one or ten people who are listening, who might get something out of it, then that - then that's great. A lot of people who come talk to you just don't understand what's happening to them. You know, they've got this terrible anxiety or depression, or whatever it is. They just don't understand how - why are they're feeling like this? You know, everything was normal only five minutes ago, and now they feel like this, and what's it all about?

And one of the very first things I say is, ‘Well, look, you know, let's just go back to the, you know, Neolithic Age. There's two tribes, one tribe load of people are all up in the evening thinking, “God, we nearly got eaten by a tiger or destroyed by the neighbouring tribe yesterday. How are we gonna work out how to mitigate that threat tomorrow?’ And another tribe is full of people smoking dope, and chilling out and thinking everything's gonna be fine.

Well, guess which tribe survived? [LAUGHS] You know. So this is a very fundamental human trait, to want to control your destiny and it’s perfectly natural and it's not, by no means all bad. Most people who are successful have it to quite a high degree, or it shouldn't just be called anxiety, I don't think. That's a complete misnomer.

It comes from being, you know, having a desire to control your fate too, too much. But most people like that, you know, they have quite strong personalities and quite strong brains, and therefore, the, the thought processes that are causing them trouble is also, you know, you mentioned your childhood, and, you know, constantly thinking, ‘Well, when do I get over the line? When is it gonna be enough?’ But you’re not - I've known you a long time, you know, you're quite a driven personality, that’s quite [Totally] - well, that's quite a driven thing, right? You know, you can't - you can't just switch that off in five minutes.

CRAIG

No, you can't, and I think that you, you have to address it and ask, ‘Why am I doing it, and where does it get me?’ And I sort of came up with a sort of image like, I felt like I'd been - the object of my life is to build these massive sort of cities and sand castles on the beach and, you know, I’d get in my mechanical digger and shove sand around and create these amazing things, and then the sea would come in and wash them away, and then I'd get up the next day and do it again.

And you’re like, this endless kind of cycle of thinking, ‘At some point it'll be okay. At some point it’ll last. At some point it'll all be [Yeah] it'll all be fine’. It's not, and I think that the other thing, just listening to you, is I think that there, there is a lot of pressure builds up, isn't there? And you don't really, almost don't notice, and then suddenly it's like a dam breaking, and suddenly [Yes] you are -

For me what happened was, there was a moment, which wasn't really that big a deal, but I suddenly, my body was like in this ultra fight or flight mode, flooded with cortisol and adrenaline all the time. Weeks of feeling just completely on edge and that, and it's like, it was like a dam had broken, and at that moment, I thought, you know, like, ‘You really do need to go and have a proper look at this and think, why are you doing this and is there a better way of doing it?’

TOM

It's kind of a fever. Don’t, don't you think that's a good description? [Yeah, yeah] Builds and builds until it gets to the point where it's making you so ill, you can't function anymore. Having known you a long time, I'd imagine, you know, you could go back a long way and trace it right, you know, you were a pretty driven person, right from when I first knew you.

And in a way, that just shows how well human beings can function for a very long time in a slightly higher state and they probably - you know, I don't know that we were designed as human beings to function at that level of adrenaline and cortisol and drive, you know, all day, every day, for long periods, and that's why we get to the end of it.

CRAIG

I think - and looking back, I think I was great at masking it. I remember, in some of the high pressure jobs that I did, like standing in the shower, and just like, lifting myself up to face another day, and like literally pulling myself up and pushing myself forward, and it was exhausting, I think. But look, I mean, I want to move on to some of the things that happened to you [Yeah] and it seemed to me like, we - we were both ITN trainees, and in my interview to be a trainee, I remember being asked why I wanted to do what made me think -

And I said, ‘Well, look, I want to be at the centre of things’. And I think that that was a lot - a drive of a lot of people who go into journalism, is they want to be where the action is, or where interesting things are happening, and just being part of it. And it struck me that, you know, like, you may not have articulated it in that way, but you were at the centre of things a lot of the time. So much so that, you know, in Indonesia, I think it was in the late ‘90s, [Mm] and you got very badly injured. Tell us about that moment and how it happened.

TOM

I mean, firstly, yeah, you're definitely right. I mean, my last year at university, the Berlin Wall was coming down, you know, we were building up to Mandela was released not long - I mean, the world was changing. I was just, you know, I'd come home from lectures and watch it all play out on TV. It's why I started to want to join ITN actually, and that - it was so exciting, and I just thought, ‘Yeah, I wanna bit of that. I wanna be, I want to be the, the person there on the frontline reporting this’.

You know, I'd done a history degree, I was always most in- I was never a kind of really boffin head, academic historian. I always wanted to study the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution and I mean, my whole of my last year at university was spent, my main course was the CIA from the Second World War to the modern day, [LAUGHS] so it was like, I was steeped in, I'd written my thesis on the Vietnam War. You know, I was steeped in the kind of tumultuous e-events of the modern era, and I absolutely wanted to be a part of it.

And the first job in ITN I really wanted was to be Ireland correspondent. It just seemed like an amazing job. It was a conflict that had been going on. I was so interested in Irish history, I'd read a huge amount about it, I was desperate to get out there, and you know, that man- that ha- it happened, and then we had the peace process, and then I came back to cover politics, relatively briefly. But you know, my next aim was to be a foreign correspondent.

And I absolutely loved being a foreign correspondent, but I had two and then very quickly, three young children by then, and I started to kind of worry when I was going away somewhere that was really dangerous, I thought, ‘Well, I may not be the best dad in the world, but a dead dad's no use to anyone’ and I s- that started to trouble me and I would kind of like, you know, w- I think I was going to East Timor once and I was just - stayed, I couldn't get sleep - early bout of insomnia - I stayed up all night.

And Claude, my wife, would sort of wake up in the middle the night, and I was sitting there and she said, ‘What are you doing?’ [LAUGHS] And I'd say, ‘I just can't get it, you know, I’ I said, ‘I just keep on going in to look at the kids and thinking, if I don’t come back, what a shitty thing to do to them’. And she said, ‘Well, if you think like that, then don't go’. And I was like, ‘We'll go back to London. It doesn't matter’, and I was like, ‘Yeah, but you know, I’ve always wanted to do this job’. I know I couldn't answer that in my head.

But I sort of always went, and then it was never as bad as you think, or you th- when you were there, anyone who's listening to this who's experienced conflict will know this all too well, but if you haven't, it's a one really, really weird aspect of it, I think, that you have all your fear pretty much before you go, and then when you get there, you adjust in a really weird way and the kind of fear goes.

And the amount of times, you know, I've been really worried about going into something, but then when I'm there, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, that bomb just went. Oh, should we just go over there and have a - take, take a closer look?’ and it's like, ‘Well, the bomb just went off there, so that's a really bad idea’. And in a way, that's what happened that night in Jakarta, you know. I should have, we should have packed it in and gone back to the hotel about half an hour before we did, but it was, do you know.

CRAIG

So you were in the - what, you were in a riot in Jakarta, and then you get hit by, oh it’s sort of a [Yeah] firework with a chain on it?

TOM

We were in a, we were in a riot, and I don't know if you've ever been on a big ship, but big ships have big flares that, so if your ship’s going down, you fire it high into the night sky and it's got a hook, a spike on one end, a chain and the phosphorus rag wrapped around the chain, and it's got a big explosive device. That's a big ship’s flare, and somebody fire- I was in the middle of a riot in Jakarta, and I was great friends with Matt Frey, the BBC correspondent now, who's a Channel Four presenter, and his camera man was shooting, but it was quite scary.

There'd been a car bomb had gone off about 50 yards from us, about 20 minutes earlier, and quite a lot of people had died. The crowd, there was a lot of aggression around the standoff between the police, who, you know, who were all ar- you know, armed and the protesters had got, you know, I mean, there had been people with guns in the crowd and it was, it was a pretty hostile, unpleasant situation.

And, you know, the car bomb would have been a good moment to [LAUGHS] decide to get out of there, but of course, you know, it's getting a bit exciting, so curiosity killed the cat, and so you stay. [SNIFFS]

And then I was - Matt was back in the hotel, but his cameraman said, oh, he - could he come with us, because after East Timor, there was quite a lot of hostility to Westerners.

And then there was another conflagration, and I lost him in the crowd, and I didn't have his phone number ‘cos my phone had been nicked the day before. It was all interesting, the weird things that lead up to kind of that thing happening at that moment. And so I wandered between the police and the protesters to try and look for him, and I was just stepping over a motorway barrier and this enormous kind of flash came in and hit me in the leg.

And my - thank God I was wearing cotton trousers, ‘cos you know, you'll - you go up in a bit of a ball of flame, ‘cos there's a phosphorus all over you. [SNIFFS] And, yeah.

CRAIG

But it's so weird hearing you talk about that and you sort of - that all these little random events that suddenly all come together, and a guy firing a flare gun at that moment, and your - haven't got your phone and other people are off and all that kind of stuff, [Yeah] and then suddenly, it all comes into sharp focus and your life is changed.

TOM

Yes, and the weir- one of the weird things about it is when you look back on it, it makes you realise, at some point afterwards I was thinking, ‘What about all those moments in life that those things didn't stack up?’ Like you're on a plane, and if that bolt on the engine thing just shook free a little more, the, you know, the engine would fall off and the plane would crash, but it never does. Do you know, the, the million and one things that could have gone wrong that didn't.

And actually, I sometimes think it's a good example to spend less time worrying about the future, because the thing that you worry about is almost certainly not gonna happen, and the thing that you've never thought about probably - you know, I did not think I was gonna get shot by some random protester in a riot in Jakarta. And, I mean, apart from being exceptionally extremely bloody painful and a bit frightening - you know, I'm often asked, did I suffer kind of trauma from it? And I, I don’t, you know, definitely it wasn't much fun, but I don't think I did suffer particular trauma about it for, quite a precise reason.

I had been quite traumatised, I think, by the idea of leaving my children without a father, and in a way, this event changed my life by clarifying that decision, and Claude and I had a very interesting psychological reversal. So before I got shot, I'd be up, er, up all night, kind of saying, ‘Well, what if what if, what if?’ and she's like, ‘Either you, as you say, can do it safely, in which case, do it, or you can't do it safely, in which case don't. It’s binary. Make the decision’. And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, but you know, blah, blah, blah’.

And then afterwards, she was like, ‘Well, you said you can do it safely, and you can't, so now you need to stop doing it’. I'm like, ‘Well, no, but I got shot and I survived’. You know, um, so we'd reached totally different conclusions. I thought I was invincible and she was like, ‘You're a total idiot. No!’ I mean, weirdly, you know, if the Iraq War happened now and ITN wanted me to go to present I, I - I mean, I should be careful saying this. Claude might have a thing or two to say about it, but I, I wouldn't mind going now, now that my children are grown up, and, you know, of course I don't want to leave them, I definitely don't wanna leave Claude, my wife, who’ been amazing to me for almost 30 years.

But, you know, I'm 54. Lots of my, you know, I have friends who've got cancer. I mean, you know, anything can happen, and the chances of something happening in a conflict zone are still relatively low. I could get hit on my bike by a car tomorrow, and actually, I literally, when I was in Hong Kong, when I was a foreign correspondent, I would actually spend hours trying to mathematically do models on the relative risk of being a foreign correspondent, vis-à-vis commuting to London [LAUGHS] to work at Gray’s Inn Road on a bike.

I mean, that's slightly demented, right, but I wanted to kind of say to myself, ‘You're not being irresponsible to your family by doing this’, and I wanted a model that told me that I wasn't. And that's probably the definition of madness. I'm gonna regret [LAUGHS] admitting to it, but you know, risk is often not about the absolute nature of risk, it's about the relative nature of your approach to it. And of course, that changes over time as well.

And you know, of course, I wouldn't wanna leave the world now, but I don't feel, I wouldn't feel, I don't think. I, you know, I wouldn't wanna leave the kids, I wouldn’t wanna leave Claude, but I don't feel that kind of elemental thing that as a father, it wasn't fair to be taking these risks when my kids were so young. I just had that incredibly strong - you know, I would, I'd never even thought about it when I was in Ireland, it never crossed my mind, but with young kids, it just was a knot in my gut that wouldn't go away.

CRAIG

Let's wind forward to 2018, and suddenly you discover you've got chronic insomnia. I mean, [Yeah] and this isn't just, I’m - can't sleep tonight. I, you know, and it's a bit of a pain in the neck. This is like, week after week, month after month insomnia of not sleeping, right?

TOM

It was what I'd call very acute insomnia, not chronic insomnia. By and large, I didn't have a problem sleeping. I had always taken some sleeping pills called zopiclone, when I went on long haul travel. So you know, you're flying somewhere, you know as well as I do, you're flying somewhere, you're working the next day, maybe working the next three days, and if you don't get some sleep on the plane, you're a bit stuffed.

So you know, I would - and that was something I definitely started as a foreign correspondent and you know, I had to, I had to get some sleep on the plane. You know, sometimes you'd be just literally travelling overnight for the first three nights and working during the day. So I h- I’d had these things around that I would take occasionally, and then I guess I sort of fell off a cliff around Easter and I probably was aware from January that year that I wasn't feeling quite right.

And it was a sort of extension of something I'd been feeling on and off really, since my mother died, I guess. It had been, it had been escalating. And then I just suddenly got to the point where I couldn't get to sleep, and so I suppose I had probably a month or maybe six weeks, of this kind of hideous battle. So I wouldn't get to sleep, I take a zopiclone at three in the morning. I'd sleep but maybe only for four hours, then I'd feel rubbish.

Then I took another zopiclone the next night. I’d s- you know, but not ‘til three in the morning. I'd sleep for four hours, then I’d decide I really had to s- I was only sleeping because of the zopiclone, therefore I was addicted to them, therefore, I had to stop taking them, therefore I was not gonna take one tonight. And I'd get into a sort of machismo battle with them, [LAUGHS] you know, and I, I just - and then I wouldn't sleep at all, not a wink, and then the next night, I’d think, ‘Well, I'll definitely sleep tonight’. And I wouldn't, and then I’d admit defeat at four in the morning and take a zopiclone, and then you, oh, you read all these books and you -

CRAIG

So is, is Claude there at the same time, your wife?

TOM

Yeah, I mean, she, she, you know, she's always been a good sleeper but I mean, I remember at its worst, and she doesn't really know what's going - I mean, she's lovely about it, but she doesn't really know what the hell's going on, and why, you know, why has it suddenly got this bad, and well, she - I think she sort of does and she's -

I've actually already started to see the psychiatrist at her kind of urging. She's like, ‘You really need to get proper help. You are, you are close to a very dangerous cliff edge, and you need to get help’. And actually, it was sort of after I went to see the psychiatrist that the real insomnia started. I'd only just started seeing him, and I think that's because I opened Pandora's box and [Yeah] suddenly everything is coming piling out, and you know, and I, I just can't sleep.

I mean, at one point, I'm sort of outside our bedroom door, curled up in a ball on the floor, and she's like, literally lying on the floor next to me saying, ‘Look, it's gonna be alright. Don't worry about it. We'll get through this. I don't know what's happening, you don't know what's happening. You know, you've got a very good psychiatrist, we'll, we'll get it out’. But I you know, at that point, you're thinking, I, you know, ‘I'm gonna lose everything, I'm gonna lose my wife, I’m gonna lose my family, I’m gonna lose my job, I'm gonna lose my house’, and you're kind of going mad.

CRAIG

And during the day, so you, so I edited television news bulletins, and you know, you need people on it, and you need your presenter on it and sharp, and ready, [Yeah] and going on air. Just describe that because, you know, the build up to going on air, even on a sort of fairly average night, you know, it can be quite tense, you know, stuff’s coming in late. [Yeah] You're expected to turn on a sixpence You know, we're not doing this, we're moving that up and down, and that kind of thing. What was that like?

TOM

The way it kind of happened was that I hadn't really had an identifiable problem with sleep. In other words, yeah, I was a bit, and I wasn't feeling great, and I was probably taking zopiclone too many nights, but I, I hadn't got a problem with sleep, per se. I wouldn't have said I did. But then it was Easter, so I took a week off, and then by the time we got to the end of the week off, I was fully into this crisis. S

So I took, I’d ph- you know, I phoned the office, I didn't explain what was wrong with me, I just said, ‘Oh, I don't feel very well, I, I can't come into work’. So I probably took another week off, maybe two, I, I'm not absolutely sure. It sort of could - all a bit of a blur, that period, but it definitely didn't last any longer than three weeks from beginning to end. So I'm in a- as in the end point, I was signed off work for three months. And you know, that was that.

CRAIG

And round [But-] about this time you were, you went to Greece. Tell - I mean, how did that fit in it, and, ‘cos there was something really shocking happened there.

TOM

Well, my mother had died. That was when I took over News at 10, and obviously taking over News at 10 is pretty stressful. You're - it's a big step. We were quite revolutionising the programme, not everyone in the newsroom loved that idea. I was sort of driving it all through myself, so that was, it was quite a stressful time anyway, and my mother had died, my father was very, very unwell physically, psychologically and mentally.

And I really, you know, I'm an only child as we've discussed earlier, so I was kind of like, propping him up, which was exhausting. You know, I really loved him but it was, you know, he’d just, I mean, he’d been in the hospital five times that summer, quite apart from being very depressed and lots of other things. And then we sort of get to Greece and this a guy drives off the quay. This old guy drives his car off the key, just drives past us and just keeps driving, and the car sort of sails out. It's like some surreal, er, it’s just like some surreal movie.

And I sort of dive in and I dive down and I get to it, and he's sinking, and he's looking at me - anyway, so it was pretty hideous, and, yeah.

CRAIG

Let's walk through that. So you see this car drifting past you, it - and the guy was committing suicide, right? [Yeah] But did you - you thought what? His brakes aren’t working, or he's, you know, what - what's going on here? You're thinking, [We-] is it an accident, or-?

TOM

- we’d got a really early morning flight, and I was exhausted anyway, so I was just like, literally half asleep on the quay. We're waiting for a ferry to the island, we, we- you know, we’d been to quite often on holiday, and we're all just lolling there, and this, there's this, there's a shout, from somewhere back there, and the Customs guard is running after this car, which I think is a bit weird.

I mean, it's, I mean, it's Greece in the summer, like, it’s, you know, everything's laid back, you know, everyone's half asleep. Um, greatest respect to any Greeks who may be listening, [LAUGHS], that’s what’s glorious about it. And then suddenly this guy is just sort of driving towards us and he just drives past us. He’s not like, really - he’s not doing 60, he’s probably doing 30, which is quite a lot, I guess, on a quay, but you know, it's not -

- and then he just goes into the water, and for a moment, I just think, ‘What?’ I mean, that’s just so weird, and then he's sort of drifting away and it's pretty clear that he's gonna start sinking, and he doesn't appear to be getting out of the car. So I, I dive in, which in retrospect was not actually a very sensible thing to do, and I swim up to it and when I get to the door, and the kind of window’s partly open and he’s… I sort of get to the door, and he's sort of just looking at me, and I'm trying to -

CRAIG

Does he look distressed, or -?

TOM

No. He's just sort of looking at me and no, no particular expression that I can recall. I just remember this sort of old man looking at me, and then immediately, as sort of as I get there, it starts to sink and I sort of hold on for a minute, and then I look down and it's just sinking to the bottom, and he's still not trying to get out, and then I kind of shout at my kids to throw me their goggles and they do, and I start trying to dive down.

CRAIG

There must have been a moment where you - the guy go - you look at the guy and go, ‘He doesn't want to be helped’.

TOM

Yes, and I - I mean, look, I, I don't know how - I dived down a few times, I sort of got down close to the car. I could see the bubbles coming out. I couldn't see - I just couldn't get close enough to see his face anymore but I, you know, I was, I was sort of almost to the point of being able to touch the car, but I didn't have enough, I didn't have enough air to get right down and start trying to open the door.

But you know, and I, I guess I went down, I don't know, three or four times before I realised there's no way I'm ever gonna be able to get down with enough air to have any chance of getting him out of the car.

CRAIG

You're suddenly confronted with this situation where somebody’s literally killed themselves and it's like, I can see you exhausted after it, mentally and physically, and just looking at it and going, you know, ‘What the hell? What is this place? What's happening?’ You know -

TOM

Well, it certainly didn't help that he was 82 or 83 and he’d lost his wife to cancer. You know, and my dad was 82 or three and had lost his wife to cancer, so it was a kind of, it was a - and, you know, honestly, there were days when my dad would admit to me he didn't wanna be alive, which was exhausting. And I, you know, I spent a lot of my time convincing them, him that we loved him and we really wanted him to be alive and all the rest of it, and he w- yeah, he was very, v- he had to -

CRAIG

But this is, it's churning stuff up, isn't it? And it's interesting, isn't it, because you can see how suddenly that magnifies and amplifies and becomes a crisis.

TOM

Yeah. In the early days of seeing the psychiatrist, we spent a lot of time talking about that Greek holiday in a number of ways, partly because I said it was the first time that I was really aware that I had an anxiety problem. For the rest of that holiday, I would sit on a Greek beach in the sunshine, and I said to him, ‘I don't understand. I'm surrounded by my wife whom I - you know, I'm incredibly lucky in my marriage, I love my wife. I've had an amazing marriage, and I'm incredibly lucky with my kids. We all get on, I really love them, and I'm surrounded by them. Like everything I care about, and I feel awful. What's that all about?’

And he said, ‘Well, firstly’, he said, ‘You wouldn't believe in number of people who come in here just off holidays, because when, if you think about it logically, it's the time when you should be feeling great, so if you have got an underlying condition, then you would be feeling more depressed about that on holiday because you'd be noticing it more.

CRAIG

I think that's a really interesting point because it's also a moment where you kind of have to stop. [Yeah] So like, the reality is, I think that you know, I kept plates spinning [Mm] all the time, and that that was almost a way of not having to look at some of the stuff that was maybe a bit more uncomfortable and difficult. And then suddenly you're in a moment where you, there's rest and relaxation, or whatever, and suddenly you are with that reality, and you'll have to confront things.

TOM

Yeah, and you know, it’s, it's funny, actually, you think of all the things we learn in school that are frankly, have limited use for the rest of our life. I can have a long list of things that I was rubbish at and I spent a lot of time learning at school that I just think, why did I learn that? What a waste of time. I think it's staggering that we get to the end of school without at least a basic understanding of the human mind, the human psychology and the human body.

I mean, like, I mean, I'm not saying we have to have, you know, the entire school curriculum turned over to learning about mental health but it's incredible, I think, that we don't turn out 16, 17,18-year-olds who know the basics, so that when they're suffering with something, they might understand, you know, the basics of what might have gone wrong and how they might get help.

CRAIG

This is a podcast about wisdom and what people have learned from stuff, and we've already talked about a lot of the lessons you learned, but the question we always ask at the end is like, if there was one piece of wisdom that you could hand over to people, what would it be?

TOM

I guess I'm always, you know, it's always dangerous to dispense wisdom, ‘cos it sounds like you feel like you've got any. [LAUGHS] I may well have none whatsoever. I think the thing that I would say in connection, I guess, with a lot of stuff we've been talking about, is it really helps to develop a meaningful sense of fatalism in life.

Now, that is not the same as saying you give up on trying to do the things you want in life, or doing your reasonable best to create the life for yourself that you want, but we have a deluded sense about how much of our destinies we control, and how much of our fates we can actually affect. There are lots of things we can affect, and there are lots of things we can't affect.

And just being realistic, and fatalistic, about all the things we can't. You know, you can't control what people think of you. You can't control threats that are gonna come from nowhere. You can't keep everyone you love alive indefinitely. You can't keep yourself alive indefinitely. These are things that are going to happen, and trying to sort of accept that as much as you can, and live today because today we're here today, the people you love are here, today the sun may be shining.

CRAIG

I think that's so true, and one of the things that really, the penny dropped was when I was listening to somebody here saying, ‘Look, you're one of seven billion people on a planet. You've got a very small perspective. There's all this stuff going on out there that you've never touched or even thought of, and so what makes you think you can control it, or that the act of trying to control everything is going to actually work in any way, and cause you anything other but stress and unhappiness?

TOM

Do you know, we had to put our poor dog down the other day. She had cancer and she was in horrible pain; it was the right thing to do. And I thought afterwards, I kind of got a bit of PTSD after it, weirdly. Not from that specifically, but from my parents getting ill and dying, everything else. And I think part of it is that crystallisation, that every creature on this planet has their time to die, and you're gonna have your time to die, and I'm gonna have my time to die.

And I found myself thinking, ‘Am I gonna be ready?’ And the reason I was thinking about that is that I want to be ready because in some level, or in some ways, that's the key for me to a calm, happy life. If I'm not frightened of dying, I'm really getting the best out of living. And that doesn't mean I wanna die. Definitely don't wanna die, I'd like to live to, you know, a hundred If I possibly can. But we're going to, and you don't know when, and you don't know why, and you - there are - that’s just in the bracket of things that you don't control.

And I remember, you know, my psychiatrist was quite big early on in talking about the Serenity Prayer, which I'm sure everyone listening to this will know. You know, you know, ‘God, give me the serenity to accept what I can't change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference’. And I, I've been over that so many times in my head, partly because the things you can't change is, as we've discussed, a much bigger bracket then you think.

The courage to change things you can, well, that's - that's where you're meaningfully trying to control your destiny because there are some things you can change and you should try and change them. But it's just nowhere near, near as big a bracket as you think, and I think the key to happiness is being accepting of the much bigger bracket of things you can't change, and that I guess is what I mean by a meaningful sense of fatalism in life.

CRAIG

Thanks so much to Tom Bradby for being so candid. If you’re concerned by the references to suicide in the interview, you can go to the Samaritans website for information and help. Our next guest is Kenny Imafidon, who managed to rebuild his life after he was wrongfully imprisoned for a murder he did not commit.

KENNY

When you're in a situation and you have nothing and you're at rock bottom, a lot of things that people care about, you understand it's just vanity, and it's not like a case of I need to read a book about this or anything else. I know this in my soul.

CRAIG

Kenny is now an award-winning social entrepreneur and campaigner, with plenty of wisdom to share. I hope you can join me for that conversation. Please like and subscribe to Desperately Seeking Wisdom, and tell your friends about it. You can also find transcripts and further reading on our website, desperatelyseekingwisdom.com. I’m Craig Oliver and this is a Creators Inc Production.