‘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 findFor 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. Continue reading...

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