\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>hat do vicars do in their spare time? Last week, I went with two friends, both fellow vicars, to see the new film I Swear. I knew from the trailer that it was about a man with Tourette syndrome (TS). What I didn\u2019t know was that it was about a real person: John Davidson who was the subject of a 1989 BBC documentary called John\u2019s Not Mad and who later received an MBE for his efforts to educate people about the condition and support his fellow sufferers.<\/p>\n Before that programme, most people had never heard of TS. Nearly 40 years later, everybody (sort of) knows what it is, but it\u2019s still often treated as a punchline \u2013 particularly on the comedy circuit.<\/p>\n From the trailer, it seemed clear that the film was going to try to have its cake and eat it by both capitalising on the undeniable comic potential of someone shouting the most inappropriate things (\u201cI use spunk for milk\u201d) at inopportune times and attempting to continue Davidson\u2019s work of raising awareness in a respectful and sensitive way. I hope it\u2019s not a spoiler to say it was successful on both counts \u2013 but of course I only knew that by the end.<\/p>\n As the film was starting, a young man sitting in the row in front of us suddenly shouted out a string of obscenities. For a minute, I thought it was a joke \u2013 albeit one in very poor taste. However, it quickly became apparent that this was a real-life person with TS: a teenager accompanied by his father.<\/p>\n And as the film continued, so did the boy \u2013 with no apparent intervention from either his dad or anyone in the audience. I felt somewhat conflicted. Clearly, it was a big deal for this family to see their no doubt incredibly difficult life depicted on the big screen, and I was pleased that they were having that opportunity. But was it OK that I (and everyone else in the auditorium) could hardly hear the film as a result? Could the cinema not have put on a special screening \u2013 as most of the chains regularly do for neurodiverse people in general?<\/p>\n <\/span>John Davidson signs copies of his memoir, I Swear, about living with Tourette syndrome, at Wigtown book festival, Galloway, 4 October 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Steven May\/Alamy<\/p>\n I\u2019m ashamed to say that I actually considered saying something \u2013 not to the boy\u2019s father himself (I\u2019m not a monster), but to the manager of the theatre. However, both of my clearly more charitable fellow vicars seemed to have resigned themselves to what was happening. Plus, in the back of my mind was the (admittedly fictional) incident in Extras when Ricky Gervais\u2019s Andy Millman complains about a child making too much noise in a restaurant, unaware that he has Down\u2019s syndrome. He barely survived the resultant bad press \u2013 and my offence would have been far worse because I knew the boy literally couldn\u2019t help it.<\/p>\n Fortunately, my better nature prevailed and something extraordinary happened over the following hour and a half. First, I simply became accustomed to the once-intrusive noise. Then, as the film reached its climax and we saw the incredibly liberating effect that Davidson\u2019s Tourette\u2019s camps have had on so many people, I felt humbled and very privileged to be sharing this moment with people who\u2019d actually lived it not just as actors \u2013 although Robert Aramayo\u2019s performance as Davidson was superb and, in my view, award-worthy.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve had similar experiences in the cinema before \u2013 watching The King\u2019s Speech with a friend with a stammer and his speech therapist wife, or bumping into actual veterans of the Normandy landings in the foyer after Saving Private Ryan \u2013 but this was on another level. It was like a 4D screening, but instead of the chairs moving about and sprays of water hitting you in the face, the characters were sitting next to you saying, \u201cThis isn\u2019t just a movie. It\u2019s my reality.\u201d And then swearing. Spunk for milk.<\/p>\n So I didn\u2019t complain. As the credits rolled, I actually went and thanked Joe \u2013 who was 14 \u2013 and Mark, his father, for the gift of their presence, which undoubtedly made our experience even more profound than it would have been anyway. We then had a long chat and took a selfie together \u2013 during which we all shouted a rude word in solidarity with Joe.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/span><\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n I would strongly encourage everyone to go and see this brilliant movie and, if you\u2019re lucky enough to find yourself sharing the cinema with someone like Joe, don\u2019t be a nimby like I was at first. You know the sort of thing: \u201cOf course I want people with this condition to be able to see this film, just not in the same screening as me!\u201d Believe me, your experience will be all the richer because they\u2019re there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What do vicars do in their spare time? Last week, I went with two friends, both fellow vicars, to see the new film I Swear. I knew from the trailer that it was about a man with Tourette syndrome (TS). What I didn\u2019t know was that it was about a real person: John Davidson who<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[7581,1925,17961,6216,17960,3305,17959,17958],"class_list":{"0":"post-30676","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-cinema","9":"tag-heard","10":"tag-holy","11":"tag-lesson","12":"tag-ravi","13":"tag-taught","14":"tag-tolerance","15":"tag-vicars"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}