'However hard it gets I refuse to cave in'

IT'S A FUNNY OLD WORLD | THIS WEEK'S COLUMNIST TV presenter Aidy Smith

- TIM OGLETHORPE

I've got a superpower. And one of my aims in life as a TV presenter is to encourage other people, with the same superpower, to make full use of it! The power in question is Tourette's syndrome and I regard it as 66 a gift, rather than a weakness. I discovered, in my mid-teens, that if I focused on something about which I really cared, all the excess energy that would otherwise have come out in the form of tics would be channelled into something I absolutely adored. Back then it was DJing and theatre studies, now it's podcasts, writing and making TV series The Three Drinkers. In the same way, musicians Lewis Capaldi and Billie Eilish, both of whom have Tourette's, are able to really focus on their singing and songwriting.