For anyone who remembers watching John’s Not Mad, the breakthrough TV documentary about John Davidson, a young British man with severe Tourette’s syndrome, I Swear is more of the same – a supportive and tender film about a man walking about with a neurological glitch that makes him tic uncontrollably, swear inappropriately and say all the wrong things at the wrong times.
The condition is often, to the outsider, very funny, it must be said. John’s Not Mad knew this – what a joy it was to watch a TV show in prim 1989 primetime with F bombs detonating all over the place. I Swear knows it too. It opens with a grown-up John receiving an award from Queen Elizabeth II, and shouting “Fuck the Queen” before stepping forward in his finest bib and tucker to be presented with his MBE from a monarch who has clearly been briefed.
It then goes back in time, to teenage John (Scott Ellis Watson), a bright and neuro-normal kid, outgoing, good at football, cheeky with the girls, whose life is transformed when he’s suddenly seized by the urge to say the most incendiary things. At the cinema with a nice girl he fancies, whose concerned mother has come along as chaperone, he destroys the evening by suddenly blurting out, “Suck my dick,” at the top of his voice. At school he spits food in the face of the headmaster, is mocked by the other kids, gets into fights, more swearing, more punishment. At home his parents don’t understand John’s “nonsense” and things get tense. Very tense.
However brilliant you might think Scott Ellis Watson is as the young John, Robert Aramayo is even better as the older one, the action suddenly cutting to a grown-up John, now aware that he has a condition called Tourette’s syndrome, and trying to find a fulfilling path through life.
Here’s where it gets tender, as the small coterie of John’s unofficial support team are introduced. Maxine Peake plays Dottie, the friend’s mother who takes John in because his mother (Shirley Henderson) can no longer cope. Dottie has been diagnosed with cancer – “You’re going to die of cancer!” John shouts in her face at their first meeting – but works as a mental health nurse and has some understanding, though her patience is tried when one of John’s tics send a fist flying into her face. Peter Mullan plays Tommy, a caretaker at a community centre who gives John a job and a sense of purpose. From this base John scrabbles together a life, eventually dedicating himself to helping others like himself – hence the MBE.
On one level who needs interiority and actorly subtlety when shouting “fuck” and gurning are the lot of the Tourette’s sufferer? And yet both Watson and Aramayo handle the “externals” brilliantly while also conveying the struggle and frustration of being locked up with a mind that seems determined to sabotage every social situation.
I held off watching this because, being frank, names like Peake, Henderson and Mullan – great actors though they are – often come with a bleeding heart and the sort of empathy I’m not always after. But I was surprised, inspired, touched and laughed a lot. There’s a brilliant scene where John is introduced to another Tourette’s sufferer, Lucy (Andrea Bisset, who has the condition in real life) and the two of them sit in the back of a car together, getting to know each other via a prolonged bout of foul-mouthed abuse. The strange workings of the misfiring mind – “My dad’s a jellyfish,” one of them shouts at one point à propos nothing at all.
It’s this meeting that propels John into becoming an activist and on to the film’s happy – of sorts – ending.
I Swear – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
