A celebrity sufferer sensitively explains an illness often misunderstood Stephen Fry: the secret life of the manic depressive BBC2

Having had second- and third-hand experience of it in civilian life, I have never considered manic depression an especially celebrity illness (not like amphetamine addiction, for instance, or egomania). Having said that, there are certainly manic celebrities around and, in my day job, I have interviewed some of them. When Carrie Fisher threw her beret across the room at me, when Robert Downey, Jr stabbed his 98th cigarette in his pizza, and, indeed, when Stephen Fry talked at me non-stop for 90 minutes so entertainingly that it made a joy out of the chore of transcribing the tape, each was, I see in retrospect, probably a little manic at the time.

In this first-class, atmospherically filmed, two-part documentary (18 and 26 September) Fry pondered the link between his bipolar cycle and his antic talent. I think the conclusion he drew was that there wasn't much of one - either that, or most of the reputed four million manic depressives living in Britain are in the wrong careers. The trouble is that, like autism, schizophrenia and Tourette's, the condition is too interesting not to have entered the language as a metaphor. Local radio DJs don't yet say "I'm a bit bipolar, me" - but the catchphrase is probably coming. Fry claimed that a Hollywood producer once quipped: "You don't have to be gay or Jewish to get on here, just bipolar."

But when Fry visited Robbie Williams at his home in Los Angeles it became clear that, while Williams has depressive episodes, on stage his mania is strictly a performance. Nor do the upswings usually help artistic creativity (Adam Ant has said that when on an up, he felt like a bee bumping against a window), although Carrie Fisher, interviewed by Fry on one of her quieter days - yet still loopy as a corkscrew - insisted: "Even if it is not true you are more talented when you are manic, you feel like you are."

What most of his interviewees agreed, however, was that the manic end of the illness could be fun. Tony Slattery couldn't entirely suppress a smile as he remembered how he had taken to throwing electronic equipment into the Thames while the bemused river police looked on. A former naval lieutenant talked enthusiastically about seeing the souls of dead soldiers in seagulls. Even though he had lost his job and his marriage and once been so depressed that he tried to kill himself by walking in front of a lorry, when Fry asked if he would have preferred not to be bipolar, he replied: "No. If you have walked with angels, all the pain and suffering is well worthwhile." Only Connie Perris, an ex-lawyer old before her time in her early forties, and not even a little bit of a celebrity, replied: "I bitterly resent my manic depression."

"Golly wolly," said Fry as he examined the small suitcase of pills she was taking, and you could see him suppress a wince. He had to keep another wince down when in America, where a doctor talked confidently of diagnosing manic depression in four-and-a-half-year-olds. A mother exhibited something bordering on parental pride as she recounted the antics of her two bipolar boys, one diagnosed at six and the other at eight. In their battle for sanity they too possess a formidable pharmaceutical armoury. "All of that to take the edge off a 16-year-old's wild behaviour?" Fry mused.

His own story, the backbone of the first programme (19 September, 9pm), also started in childhood. As a teenager, he had gone on a mad spree with stolen credit cards and ended up in jail. Yet it was not until 11 years ago, when he famously walked out of the lead role in a West End play, that he finally got treatment. In the meantime, he had "self-medicated", by which he means he drank to sedate himself and snorted cocaine to - Well, he said, his brain worked so fast that the cocaine actually slowed him down, too.

At the time of making the first film, Fry took no medication - something he was sanguine about until tests showed that he was, in fact, at the upper end of the manic-depressive scale. He concluded, startlingly: "I think I need to change my life dramatically." In the second film, he examines the treatments. I hope he will take the often deadening drug lithium in for especially close questioning. It will be interesting to see how his story turns out and if he decides he needs medicating, but this documentary's main asset is not Fry's experience, nor even his bravery in discussing it, but his intelligence.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

Pick of the week

Jane Eyre
Starts 24 September, 9pm, BBC1
Cracking adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's crackers classic.

South Bank Show
24 September, 11.10pm, ITV1
With Cracker about to return, grumpy Robbie Coltrane gives a rare interview.

Anatomy of a Crime
27 September, 9pm, BBC2
Real-life case-crackers solve the murder of a Nigerian chief in Manchester.

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