![]() ![]() The topics under discussion in this afternoon’s episode are, first, the ways in which the disease affects voice, and second, the bedside manner of neurologists. “You seem,” the doctor said, gravely, “to have difficulty using your smiling muscles.” “Well,” Mayhew-Archer replied, “you’ve just told me I’ve got Parkinson’s.” He’s gone on from there. When Mayhew-Archer was first diagnosed, his consultant ran him through some of the tell-tale signs. The group is completed by Paul Mayhew-Archer – co-writer of The Vicar of Dibley – who responded to his condition by returning to the stage with a celebrated Parkinson’s-related standup comedy show. Rory Cellan-Jones, long-time technology correspondent at the Beeb, brings an inquiring medical curiosity to the proceedings, while Mark Mardell, former North America editor, offers a thoughtful human counterpoint to Paxman’s enjoyable vitriol. Gillian Lacey-Solymar, a former McKinsey consultant, BBC consumer affairs correspondent and senior teaching fellow at University College London, has had the disease the longest and most severely, and is the voice of determined courage around the table. If Paxman is the Eeyore of the group, and Mostyn at the Tigger-ish glass-half-full end of its spectrum, the rest occupy singular places in between. I feel a bit of a fraud – it used to be called the shaking palsy but I don’t have the shakes yet like some people Jeremy Paxman The six Movers and Shakers each have a different experience of the disease – some prefer to call it a syndrome – and different and ever-shifting strategies for coping with it. The pub-table format works perfectly, because just as there is no one set of Parkinson’s symptoms – the NHS website lists at least 20 – so there is no single response to them. ![]() They are funny and honest not only about Parkinson’s, which afflicts about 150,000 people in the UK, and 10 million people worldwide, but about the slings and arrows of life in general. If you have not listened to the initial dozen episodes, I’d urge you to do so. They are here today to record the first episode of a new series, which will come out in September. For more than 18 months they have met regularly around this corner table with four other “famous Parkys” – as Mostyn calls them – to make the podcast that discusses aspects of life with the condition, from cognitive function to constipation. As well as a gift for the trenchant one-liner, the pair share another attribute: both are living with the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. The double act between Paxman and Mostyn is a dynamic that will be familiar to listeners of the unmissable podcast Movers and Shakers. ![]()
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