The Everywhere Man; Jonathan Miller

A polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, "having learned much"; Latin: homo universalis, "universal man") is an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. WIKIPEDIA

Apparently Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) disliked being referred to as a polymath.  Too bad.  If a 90 minute BBC Arena documentary barely scratches the surface of your achievements, you’re a polymath.  He’s been described as having two brains, which enabled him to effortlessly waft between the worlds of science and the arts.  Medical practitioner, writer, comedy actor, stage designer, opera director, film and TV producer, darling of the chat show circuit (Michael Parkinson interviewed him several times, as did Clive James) and finally a sculptor – he did it all.

For many, he will be remembered for starring alongside Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett in the satirical comedy series Beyond The Fringe in the early 1960’s.  Others will remember him for his major documentary series covering topics as diverse as anthropology, zoology, atheism and mental illness.

He came from good Jewish stock.  His father was one of the pioneers of child psychiatry and an artist and his mother had her first novel published at 23.  His father carried out research into shell shock victims of the First World War.  He describes his parents as Bloomsbury Jewish intellectuals and there seems to have been little warmth in his upbringing.

From left, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. Beyond the Fringe.

At St Pauls College London, Miller studied biology alongside, and came firm friends with, such future luminaries as Oliver Sachs and Eric Korn.  “Three Jewish boys who were passionate about biology”, says Miller.  He adored the Natural History Museum.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Miller went to Cambridge in 1953 to study medicine. Whilst working as a house surgeon at University College, Miller was asked to take part in a late night review at the Edinburgh Festival (Miller always had a talent for comedy and was a wonderful mimic).  This ultimately led to him starring in Beyond The Fringe.  He was a very physical comedian and would gyrate around the stage. Eric Idle of Monty Python fame admired the mocking of authority in this series and it inspired him to seek a career in comedy.

Miller’s wife Rachel was described as the anchor, the serenity in his hyper manic life and Sachs believes he may not have achieved as much in his life without her.

Inevitably, Miller toured New York with the Beyond the Fringe team in 1962 and took advantage of the opportunity to mingle with New York intellectuals, writers and comedians – eventually writing for the New Yorker.

Upon returning to London, Miller decided to pursue a career in TV and film production as his life began to drift away from medicine.  As an outsider, not someone who had risen through the TV “ladder”, Miller felt he wasn’t bound by the normal conventions of interviewing people and documentary production.  He quickly became a top line director without any formal training and this led him to direct Alice In Wonderland for TV in 1966.  He believed the story to be about the attitudes of Victorian England to the “mystery and sanctity” of childhood.  He dispensed with the animal characters and wanted the production to be a melancholy journey to growing up. 

A scene from Alice In Wonderland with Anne-Marie Mallik as Alice and Peter Cook on the far left.

In 1968 he began a career as a theatre director at the Nottingham Playhouse.  He was highly regarded for never talking down to a young actor thus making him/her feel confident.  He wanted to explore a playful inventiveness in his directing – perhaps a benefit of not having been formally trained.  Later, he directed at the Old Vic at the invitation of Lawrence Olivier.  Miller believes that his training as a doctor – looking for minute details in how people carry themselves and talk when trying to diagnose them – assisted him in his directing career.

Miller didn’t abandon medicine entirely and in 1978 he produced the ground breaking series “The Body In Question” which was an investigation into the human body and the history of medicine.  Miller has been described as the consummate teacher, but a strong stomach was required as some of the footage was confronting. Later, he produced a program on the challenges of Parkinson’s disease.

Oliver Sachs believed that Miller never really left medicine, it’s just that the clinical life couldn’t contain him nor could the theatre/directing life.  In the early 1980’s Miller was directing Shakespeare for the BBC.  In 1979 he was approached by conductor Roger Norrington to direct an opera. Once again the lack of formal training proved no impediment and he has directed more than 60 operas where he is renowned for his innovation.  One performance of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tuti featured a guy talking on a mobile phone.  In 1987 he directed Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado for the English National Opera starring Eric Idle and he dispensed with all references to Japan.  Instead he used the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup as inspiration.

In 1995 Miller relished the paradox of being a Jewish atheist directing Bach’s St Matthew Passion as a theatrical spectacle.

It was inevitable that Miller’s all-encompassing network of interests would include the visual arts.  He developed an interest in abstract sculpture and collage.

I have to confess that it wasn’t until the mid 1990’s that I became aware of Miller via his series “Madness”, screened on the ABC late at night, which presented a social history of mental illness.  Confronting and informative, it was unforgettable television.

His interests fell under 4 main categories; art, science, anthropology and philosophy, and the world is so much the poorer without him.

References;

BBC Arena

The Conversation - Jonathan Miller, The Man With Two Brains

Tragedy Of 50 Years Of Failure

The current Covid 19 pandemic is likely to exacerbate the disturbing increase in rates of depression and anxiety in the community.  The not-for-profit charity Mind Medicine Australia, which is seeking to establish safe and effective psychedelic-assisted treatments for mental illness in Australia, has produced some alarming statistics on mental illness in this country.  The thrust of MMA’s argument is that 50 years of mainstream medication since the banning of psychedelics has completely failed the vast majority of sufferers of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addictions.

As a result of lobbying by MMA, the Therapeutic Goods Administration is seeking submissions from the public on a proposal to amend the scheduling of substances including psychedelics so they can be made available for therapeutic treatment. (The closing date for submissions was 28th September 2020).

What needs to be understood here is that psychedelics were banned in the US in 1970 by the Nixon Administration for political reasons.  It was part of Nixon’s strategy to kill off the anti-Vietnam war movement, thus years of research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA was flushed down the toilet.  Most other countries followed suit.

I would argue that the failure of the mental health system in general and mainstream medication in particular has manifested itself in the increased suicide rate and the emergence of, among other things, the media psychiatrist.  This brings me to the 1991 series “Madness” presented by the remarkable Jonathan Miller who died last November, which explores the history and treatment of mental illness. 

In one episode, titled “The Talking Cure”, Miller looks at the history of psychoanalysis.  It begins with Miller driving along a huge freeway in the US whilst listening on his car radio to the ‘psychiatrist turned agony uncle’ David Viscott taking calls from the distressed, the lonely, the depressed and anxious.  Miller tells us that Viscott was one of the brightest young psychiatrists of his generation, but he decided to reach a much wider audience.

David Viscott

There is something perverse about listening to a distressed pot smoking young mother of 3 who also takes 2 quaaludes a day (a barbiturate) giving an account of her life, with these accounts interspersed with joyful advertising. Miller believes that Sigmund Freud’s patients would have been horrified at the thought of broadcasting their private agonies to a huge anonymous audience. 

We need to go back to the beginning.  Freud discovered that in order to effectively treat the disordered patients who presented themselves in his consulting rooms, they needed access their unconscious mind by going through a process of autobiographical reconstruction.  He recognised the way in which some patients would give a self-deceiving account of their past, which was largely due to a repressive process in the mind preventing access to its unconscious contents, which may contain pain or certain urges that are in conflict with the moral order of the social world.  Freud discovered that the repressive process didn’t annihilate those contents.  Instead, it was likely that those unconscious urges would surface in a disguised form such as slips of the tongue, or in dreams.

Freud believed that if in the course of a person’s development he/she fails to reconcile certain instinctive urges in the unconscious with the increasingly demanding social world, these unresolved conflicts can arrest a person’s development and manifest themselves as psychological illness.

Jonathan Miller

Only recently has there been a revival in interest in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore and the Imperial College in London leading the charge. Studies have shown how intensive treatments in psychedelics in a controlled environment can give patients access to their biographies and allow the processing of them once and for all.  Psychedelics can open up new opportunities to patients and give them an entirely new perspective on life.  Just 3 treatments over a 2 week period is usually all that is required.  Results are very encouraging.

But in the absence of psychedelic treatments and other alternatives, plus the high cost of mental health care (Viscott charged $1500 for a 2 hour private session) many sufferers may have felt they had no option but to avail themselves of Viscott’s on air ‘services’. 

I will certainly be making a submission to the TGA. I’ve suffered depression all my life, there is a history of suicide in my family and I’ve had enough.

Just as an aside. After reaching its peak in the early 1990’s, Viscott’s career and life quickly disintegrated.  His method was to gently probe intimate details out of his clients before hitting them with a sledge hammer.  It was undifferentiated, tough love shrink radio.  But then his ratings declined along with his health.  His marriage failed and new projects came to nothing.  He died alone in 1996, aged 58.

References;

Los Angeles Times

“Madness” - BBC TV