A new TV documentary is to look at the life of Scots TV presenter Gail Porter.
Insightful documentary, Being Gail Porter, sees her open up about two decades of mental health problems, delving into her past and revealing the key moments in a deeply personal exploration of depression, self-harm and anorexia.
In 1999, Gail Porter was one of the UK’s most sought-after female TV presenters. Most famously, she helped sell over a million copies of FHM magazine after they projected her naked image onto the Houses of Parliament.
Then over the next 20 years, things took a turn for the worse – she suffered post-natal depression, alopecia and was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. In 2014 she even ended up sleeping rough on a park bench.
Gail said: ‘The celebrity fairytale became a nightmare. So how did this happen to wee Gail Porter from Portobello? It’s only now I feel able to face up to what I’ve been through. In this film, I’m going to revisit my past and try to understand my mental state. I hope I can learn something and, maybe, even help others.’
In Being Gail Porter, Gail travels to her hometown of Edinburgh where she meets friends, relatives and medical professionals to try and uncover the reasons she has such emotional extremes. The result is an honest exploration of mental health and a reminder of how much the world has changed since Gail’s TV presenting heyday in the 1990s.
Being Gail Porter is a Tern TV production for BBC Scotland and will be shown on Tuesday, 14 January, on BBC Scotland, from 10-11pm.
Read Scottish Field’s interview with Gail HERE.
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