Just one last thing...
As Michael Mosley’s final TV project receives a posthumous airing, his friend and longtime colleague Andrew Cohen pays tribute to the broadcaster
Jude Edginton
- Rosie Millard
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The tragedy of Dr Michael Mosley’s untimely death on the Greek island of Symi earlier this year is nowhere better demonstrated than by what the host of the wildly successful Radio 4 series and podcast Just One Thing with Michael Mosley left unfinished.
Mosley was in the midst of shooting a ten-part series of the same name for television when he went on that fateful holiday with his wife, Dr Clare Bailey. Only two episodes were completed before his death in June, aged 67. Yet while they will be seen as a cruelly truncated project, they are also a tribute to the pioneering doctor and journalist whose favoured way of explaining science was to immerse himself in the science.
So what are the final two “just one things” the good doctor was keen for us to try? The first is to have a cold shower for 30 seconds every morning; the second is to take up a new skill – music, a language, or pottery, for example.
Naturally, Mosley himself takes his own medicine and one of the joys of the first programme is watching him shiver under a cold shower and sit in a tub of iced water in order to show how cold water immersion can help calm inflammation and boost our immune systems, mood and brain power.
Michael Mosley tries out cold water immersion. BBC
Andrew Cohen, head of BBC Studios’ Science Unit, which produced the show, says immersion in the science was Mosley’s great idea. “One of his earliest programmes as a producer was about a scientist who proved himself that bacterial infection could cause stomach ulcers. The concept of self-experimentation lodged in Michael’s brain and he later did a show where he infected himself with a tapeworm. It broke down the barriers and took away from the notion of a doctor telling patients what to do.”
Michael helped people feel they could change their lives
Andrew Cohen
Of course, Mosley would later get us all onto the 5:2 diet, taking up intermittent fasting just as he had. And in these final episodes of Just One Thing, he is still encouraging members of the public to do as he does – in this case, prescribing cold showers to a stressed-out mother of two in north Wales, who brings along some friends for the chilly experience.
Watching Mosley gently guide the reluctant women, who go from hesitatingly standing underneath a cold shower at the beach to leaping into a Welsh lake and hanging out in there hugging one another, is a moving tribute to his can-do spirit of healthcare.
It’s also an extremely strange experience to see the TV doctor who became our friend chatting, talking and laughing with his guests. He seems so well, so hearty and healthy, just weeks before his death.
“Michael had an extraordinary ability to pull the hurdles away, to help people feel that they could change their lives,” says Cohen, who knew Mosley for 30 years and had firsthand experience not only of Mosley’s brio and energy, but also his medical skills. According to Cohen, in 2006 Mosley saved the life of a colleague who collapsed at work, performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on her until an ambulance arrived.
For Mosley, putting Just One Thing on TV had always been an ambition, adds Cohen, whose other collaborations with the presenter included Inside the Human Body, Trust Me, I’m a Doctor and Horizon. “As the success of the podcast increased, it was in our minds. The audio format of the show was so simple, so to keep that simplicity on the TV version was something we thought about long and hard.” There is, he adds, zero chance that the remaining eight episodes will be completed: “We are not thinking about that.”
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Mosley had not narrated the films before his death. Instead, Sara Cox provides the voiceover, telling viewers that he “touched and changed many of our lives”. These episodes, says Cohen, “are a chance for us to celebrate Michael’s legacy, and remember the man he was.”
Authors
Rosie Millard
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