Dirty Filthy Love Exclusive OCD-UK Interview

Dirty Filthy Love was watched by 4.4 million viewers when it was screened by ITV on September 26 . The first mainstream drama to tackle OCD and Tourette’s syndrome, it had a major impact among sufferers and their families.

OCD-UK dealt with more than 500 calls in the three days after transmission, compared with the usual number of fewer than a dozen. It has been the hottest topic ever on OCD-UK’s bulletin board, with 187 postings and 4,251 views up to November 21. Many sufferers have been positive about the drama and its contribution to raising awareness. Others, however, have expressed misgivings about the way OCD and Tourette’s were portrayed.

OCD-UK chief executive Ashley Fulwood met one of Dirty Filthy Love’s creators, Ian Puleston-Davies (above), to discuss the programme and its impact.

Scene: A Camden bar in North London - November 2004

Eight years ago, Ian Puleston-Davies was cornering the market in baddies – crooks, heroin addicts, pedophiles. He appeared in The Bill. He did a year’s stint on Hollyoaks. More recently he appeared in the BBC drama, Conviction. And then his successful acting career began to suffer under the onslaught of OCD.

“I was crippled by the illness,” he recalls. “Up until I was in my early 30s I managed to leave the OCD in my dressing room. It was when it started coming on stage or on set that I thought, this is getting very worrying now.”

Like many sufferers, Ian had no idea what his condition was. He spent months in therapy for other problems before realising that “something else is going on here”. That something, one of his therapist’s colleagues reckoned, could be OCD. “I really did think, like Mark in the film, that it had to be a tumour, or meningitis, or senile dementia,” Ian says. “But then I ended up on a psychologist’s chaise longue in Harley Street, and quick as a flash, he was saying, ‘classic case’, and handing me a box of tissues. “I broke down, on the one hand because of the relief, on the other because of enormous sadness that I hadn’t had this consultation 30 years ago. I was 35, but I realised that I’d had it since I was seven.” It was out of this major OCD episode that Dirty Filthy Love was born.

“I realised that I maybe needed to plan an alternative career, because OCD was interfering so seriously with my acting,” Ian says. “The writing ambition was there anyway, and the great adage is to make sure that the first thing you write about is something you know about.”

His first script wasn’t Dirty Filthy Love, but a drama about two misfit brothers in a North Wales farming community. It’s now being made by the BBC for transmission next spring.

But like Dirty Filthy Love, it is fired by personal experience and a passionate concern to raise awareness. A childhood friend with epilepsy inspired one of the main characters, and Ian’s father suffered problems caused by rural decline similar to those faced by the community portrayed in the piece.

With that script under his belt, Ian decided that he wanted to write about OCD and Tourette’s, from which he also suffers in a mild form. “As a sufferer, I thought it was a perfect starting point for me to begin to tell the story,” he says. “I also thought, this is payback time. I’ve lived with this condition, I’ve suffered from it, I want something back from it. And if in doing so I can help educate other people, that’s all to the good.”

Joint project

Dirty Filthy Love began to take shape when Ian appeared in My Beautiful Son and Stan the Man, produced by co-writer Jeff Pope. It became very much a joint project. “I’m not sure where the title came from, except that I probably said, ‘Dirty’, Jeff said, ‘Filthy’ and I said, ‘Love’,” Ian recalls. “From the outset my feeling was that OCD hadn’t been portrayed at all well in films. As Good as it Gets with Jack Nicholson, I got quite incensed by. I thought it trivialised the condition. You don’t get OCD sufferers skipping down the streets avoiding pavement cracks. It was not only inaccurate, it didn’t anywhere near get to grips with the illness. Then there was Matchstick Men with Nicholas Cage. The bottom line was that I didn’t think it was very well portrayed.

“Jeff and I decided that we didn’t want to patronise, we didn’t want to beautify it, and we didn’t want to make it too serious, because then it would be like a BBC 2 Open University documentary. We wanted to do funny – but the right sort of funny. I recognise that it’s a fine line, because OCD isn’t a personality disorder, neither is it character-led. It’s purely a chemical imbalance.

“But I was able to see the condition through trusted friends’ eyes, and to see the ridiculousness of it and at times laugh with my friends about it. I also wanted to make a film about normal people, creative, successful, hardworking people, and show how this illness can ruin otherwise successful careers. It’s not just people who are unlucky or can’t get a job: it’s people at the top of their careers who can be thwarted by this illness.”

Writing the script took a year and a half, and Ian and Jeff were delighted when ITV accepted it immediately. The network isn’t known for challenging, groundbreaking drama, and many TV critics have expressed surprise and praised it for taking on the project. Jeff’s role as an executive producer and head of factual drama at Granada gave the writers more of a say than usual in casting the film. “We were determined that we didn’t want the usual suspects from TV soaps; we wanted actors,” says Ian. “We were all absolutely thrilled when Michael Sheen read the script and said, ‘I’ve got to do this’. “We’ve been blessed by his performance, Shirley Henderson’s performance, and those of the actors who played members of the self-help group. We really couldn’t have got a better cast.”

Ian worked closely with Michael in the development of Mark, the main character. “Friends of mine who have lived with me through OCD said that they could see me in him,” he says. “Michael is a method actor, not in the Stanislavsky sense perhaps, but he really likes to get under the skin of the sufferer. Every OCD that you see in the film has been lifted from how I was eight years ago.”

Many examples of OCD behaviour were also left out, as the writers redrafted the script seven or eight times to meet the demands of the storyline and time constraints.
Ian was unable to spend as much time on set as he would have liked, but he did go to the read-through of the script by the actors, and found that this triggered an OCD episode.
“I sat down too quickly, and spent the whole of the time obsessed that I’d damaged my coccyx. It was absolutely surreal – there’s me the OCD sufferer, worrying about my coccyx, and there’s the actor saying the line about his coccyx.”

He also found it difficult to attend screenings of the film. “A lot of people have asked whether the experience of making it was cathartic, and I have to say no, it made me worse than I have been in years. I went to three or four screenings, and I had to sit at the back, because whenever I go to the cinema – which I rarely do, I usually get movies out on DVD – I find myself obsessing about people sitting behind me. What relation are they to each other, why did they choose this film and not the cinema next door, where have they been to work, where they’re going later. I’m there twitching my pants off and OCD-ing away.”

First realisation

There were, however, moments which confirmed Ian’s faith in the project. He went to Bexhill on Sea for the shooting of the final sequences, and recalls: “I’ve never been on a set before and seen even the sparks, wardrobe, makeup, continuity, all the people behind the scenes, with glassy eyes. That was my first realisation that we’d really got something here. I’d been worried about whether people who weren’t sufferers would be able to see the film and sympathise with the characters.”

Reaction to Dirty Filthy Love, Ian says, was “everything we dreamed of it being”. In common with OCD-UK and other charities, ITV was inundated with telephone calls, e-mails and faxes from sufferers and their families, including many people whose OCD had gone unrecognised and untreated. “That was the icing on the cake,” says Ian. “That’s when I knew that we’d done our job.”

But he is also aware that others were distressed or angered by the film. In particular, he is concerned about criticism that deciding to portray the main character with both OCD and Tourette’s could have led to confusion about which condition was which. “I don’t have full-blown Tourette’s myself, but I wanted to include it in the film,” says Ian. “I was going to work on the tube one day, and there were two guys and one of them started barking. There were two amazing things about it – the one sitting opposite him didn’t bat an eyelid, he just carried on with the conversation, but everyone else in the carriage was in shock. And at that point I thought, ‘we can’t ignore this now, we’ve just got to include this’.

“I’m also aware that only five per cent of Tourette’s sufferers have barking, grunting, or obscene words. The argument could be: why didn’t you choose a more common form of the condition? Because, there’s all the more reason to educate the audience.

To make the point that if you’re confronted by someone who’s barking, it’s not someone who’s nuts, they’re perfectly in control socially. My thinking was that we may not get a second chance. I was adamant that I wanted to get people out there to understand and sympathise and help sufferers.”

Another criticism leveled at the film is that some of the characters are ‘OTT’. Ian admits that the need to portray them in a dramatic context may have made them larger than life, but is adamant that the programme makers didn’t set out to ridicule sufferers, and that considerable care was taken over how the condition was portrayed. “We made sure that all of the actors went to an OCD self-help group and met sufferers,” he says. “Shirley also went to trich groups in Scotland, and everyone did a lot of reading. One of the things I emphasised to the actors was, we are normal people."

“I often wonder whether I would have the skills I have as an actor and writer if I didn’t have OCD, and we wanted to reflect this ‘which came first?’ argument in the characters. So the decision to portray Mark as an architect is a nod to this, as is the violin playing. I thought, let’s fly the flag. Let’s show that sufferers can be remarkable, successful people.” Many aspects of Dirty Filthy Love which have caused controversy have been drawn from Ian’s
own experience of OCD."

We decided to have a married couple, because OCD can and does wreck marriages. We wanted to show what happens when this condition eats away at a marriage, and the extremes that a person can go to.

“My partner, Sue, has been brilliant, she’s the first girlfriend who has chosen to live with me – baggage and all. But I did have a girlfriend who left me because she found my OCD frightening."

“I’ve been in a lot of relationships which I now recognise have been badly affected by my condition. I’m a lazy bugger, I’m sure there were other facets of me in there as well, but I can now separate the two things. That’s me, that’s the “The stalking thing – that was based on my experience of being obsessed that a girlfriend was seeing someone else. I didn’t stalk her in any dangerous way, but I did stand outside a cafe in Soho for hours while she was inside. I’m not a weirdo, and I wasn’t a weirdo then. It was all about obsession, which can take all forms. You might say ‘but isn’t that jealousy?’ I think jealousy can be caused by obsession, and that there are a lot of conditions out there that can be traced back to OCD.”

The film’s moving ending has also been the subject of comment, with some sufferers expressing the view that they wanted to be left with a greater sense of hope. Ian, however, says that the programme makers wanted to be as truthful to OCD as possible. “There is hope at the end of the film, but it’s realistic hope. We see that he’s got washed, that she’s back in his life, and we hope that she’ll make him go to CBT and that between the two of them they will combat this illness.”

Overall, Ian feels, his own view of Dirty Filthy Love, like that of many sufferers, is influenced by the perfectionism and doubt that go with OCD. “In hindsight, we could probably have made some bits better, we could have added bits and taken some away. But under the
circumstances, we did the best we could.”

Ian hopes that ITV will give Dirty Filthy Love a repeat showing. A stage version has also been mooted, and Ian and Jeff are exploring the idea of a television series following up the members of the Dirty Filthy Love self-help group, perhaps featuring the life and relationships of a different character in each episode.

“There’s a lot of mileage there, they’re lovely sympathetic characters,” says Ian. “But we’re very concerned that we’re not seen as saying, ‘we’ve got this thing called OCD, what else can
we do with it?’ “I’d be very interested to know what OCD-UK members and visitors to your bulletin board think about the idea. Would they welcome it?”

You can read reviews of the film following its original screening in 2004 and for that that missed it first time around we also have limited stock of the film on DVD format in our online shop.

Back to Top ^ | Homepage | E-mail this page to a friend
OCD-UK is a non-profit making charity and not associated with any other organasation.
Medical information is provided for education/information purposes only, you should obtain further advice from your doctor. Any links to external websites have been carefully selected, however we are not responsible for the content of these third party websites.
Copyright © 2004-2008 OCD-UK. All rights reserved.
WC3 XHTML 1.0 Validated | WC3 CSS Validated | Sitemap | Accessibility