I'm a writer, broadcaster, campaigner, speaker... and sometimes a comedian. I wrote and starred in Channel 4's Lee and Dean, and am the creator of ITV's coming-of-age drama Tell Me Everything.

​

And, as a kid, I was sexually abused. I wish I could say that was the only lemon life had given me, but… my dad died suddenly, without any warning, when I was 15. He just went to work one morning, collapsed, and I never saw him again. Four years later, after a long illness, my mum died. Sorry. (I know I probably don’t need to be, but I am - it’s a lot, isn’t it?)

 

My life didn’t get off to a great start, and the effects of all that early tragedy and trauma has influenced every chapter of it since. I’ve had a lot of therapy. Honestly, a LOT. So much therapy that I worried for a long time there’d be none left for anyone else. But as great and important as much of that was, there’s one thing that has made an even greater difference to my life – my outlook, my determination, my mental health, my sense of not just being a bit broken - lemonade. 

​

Not actual lemonade, of course (although I do like actual lemonade). I mean the metaphorical stuff. The ‘when life gives you lemons…’ type. I’ve made things. Some of them real, tangible things you can see and hold, some of them less so – but no less powerful.

 

My first own personal lemonade (that sounds weird) was ‘Tell Me Everything’, where I told the story of what it was like being a teenager whose dad dies. My next bottle of the sweet lemony stuff is a documentary where I explore the sexual abuse I suffered as a child. The documentary follows me as I journey through my past, meeting people who knew me growing up, and people in my life now - and as I attempt to make a sitcom about being sexually abused. Which we’ve also made.  It’s called ‘My Sexual Abuse – The Sitcom’.

 

It sounds nuts, I know. But these have been the most healing, cathartic things I’ve ever done. I’ve taken some horrible negative things and made something positive out of them. Lemonade. I think this act of creation is the real key to healing from the bad things that happen to us. Trauma destroys lives, dreams, memories, potential. What better answer is there to destruction than creation?

​

And I realised something else - my greatest successes and achievements in life have always come soon after my biggest failures, mistakes, disasters and disappointments. This realisation has been more than a bit life-changing for me... Bad stuff happens to us, there's no avoiding it - things go wrong, we go through times that we wouldn't wish on anyone else. But it's what we do next that matters, how we turn those bad things into fuel - what we create with it.

 

I think the act of making something can take almost any form - a letter, a poem, a painting, or a simple act of kindness for someone else. It might even be the very personal work of making sense of whatever has happened to us. And for all of us, I hope, it’s eventually the act of making peace with our trauma, our hardships, our failures, and ourselves. Making sense, making peace, making something – it’s all making. And it all helps to make us the strong, resilient individuals who’ve survived everything we’ve been through so far. 

​

So I'm on a bit of a mission: to find out what other people have made with the lemons life has given them, to help and encourage others to make their own lemonade, and to share the power and importance of creating something in the face of adversity.

​

I'll be Making Lemonade through a podcast, a book, and a series of talks and workshops.

 

Fancy a glass?

​

​

 

​