‘I’d had 28 years of depression – now it was gone’: Comic Paul Foot on three seconds that changed his life

 Driving through Manchester one Sunday, at the wheel of a Nissan Micra, Foot suddenly woke from decades of anxiety, anger and misery. He talks about the friends who tried to help him, and the forgiveness he struggled to find

For three years and four months, Paul Foot has been living in a state of joy. He is in it now, he says, sitting across a table, overlooking London’s Regent’s canal. He’s wearing one of his trademark blue LF Markey boilersuits, and seems serene rather than ecstatic, half smiling. But that’s because the joy doesn’t spike or yo-yo. It’s a “constant”, so reliable that even when someone he knows dies, “there’s still a peace beneath it and a joy in it as well”.

Life was not always like this, and the story of how Foot, 51, overturned 28 years of “crushing, all-encompassing depression and anxiety” is told in his critically acclaimed 2023 show Dissolve, the filmed special of which is released this week.

“I was never bipolar. I never had any highs, it was just massive lows,” he says. “To be technically accurate, I had severe anxiety that led to depression.” He felt he was locked inside a glass box. “Too depressed to go out, lying around in bed.”

Foot’s life took a hairpin turn in about three seconds of violent enlightenment one Sunday afternoon while he was driving in the suburbs of south Manchester. He’d stayed overnight, then stopped to see friends after performing his show Swan Power in Carlisle. It was 4.59pm on 20 March 2022 – the occasion so momentous it’s time-stamped in his memory – when, as he puts it, “my consciousness exploded”.

To other motorists, the magical rearrangement of brain chemistry – what Foot calls “the event” – going on behind the wheel of the Nissan Micra was invisible. “The car didn’t swerve. There was no pulling over. I didn’t see bright lights. I just carried on driving,” he says.

“It was a moment that was both extraordinary and ordinary” – like stirring from a dream. “It was just, ‘Oh, I’ve woken up …’ And it didn’t matter that I’d spent 28 years in a state of depression. It was gone. Everything was different. Immediately, I thought: ‘I’m not an irritable, angry person. That is not my true nature. That is just how I was. I’ve forgiven everything that anyone has ever done to me or will ever do.’”

If that sounds like a lot of forgiving, that’s because when he was 11, Foot was sexually assaulted. He slips this revelation into the middle of a hilarious skit in Dissolve about a fictitious dinner with former Labour MP Chuka Umunna, which is typical of how he pulls the rug from under his audience. But for decades, Foot suppressed the memory of this assault so effectively he had no awareness of it at all, and lived in denial of his depression.

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