I genuinely think Best Interests is one of the most difficult, hardest pieces of television I have ever watched. By that I mean it was difficult for me to watch, just because it brought back so many upsetting memories and thoughts. The four part drama, aired over two weeks, tells the horrific story of a dad and mum as they fight to preserve the life of one of their daughters, Marnie, who has a form of Muscular Dystrophy. They want Marnie to be kept alive, despite the fact that, over the series, we see her gradually deteriorate so that by the last episode she isn’t conscious.

This is thus hard, hard viewing for me, having lost so many friends to MD. The sight of that girl in that hospital bed last night, her family around her as the machines were turned off, raised so many gruelling, fucked up questions in my mind: is this what the families of my friends had to go through? Did they have to make choices like this? Did the Wheatleys, Foxes and Donneleys all have to watch as Andrew, Andy and Lee faded and died before them? That thought is too abhorrent for me to bear, yet last night we saw it played out on television: a family wishing their child farewell one final time.

Muscular Dystrophy is the type of thing you encounter when you grow up going to a school for physically disabled young people. I don’t think many other people will have heard of it, but it is the type of thing I learned about at school. Those were the hardest, most gruelling lessons of all. I remember first meeting a boy called Andrew Wheatley in the nursery department at school. We must both only have been five or six at the time. I remember wondering why Andy was there: at the time, he could walk, talk and feed himself, so I childishly reasoned that he was perfectly ‘normal’. As we grew up together though, I noticed Andrew’s strength slowly ebbing away: he began to use a wheelchair, and seemed less able than he once was. I didn’t understand it at the time. We went through nursery then junior school together, being joined in junior school by Lee Donnelly. Then, one day in the last year of junior school, our teacher Mrs. Tomlinson walked into the classroom one morning to tell us that Andrew had died – it was only a few months after his older brother Dan had also passed away.

I remember feeling heartbroken: it just seemed so unfair. Yet it’s the type of thing which happens in a special school; the type of thing you almost get used to when you attend one. I lost two more friends to MD: Andrew Fox passed away in 2001 aged eighteen, and most recently Lee Donnelly, whose 2018 funeral I recorded here. To a certain extent knowing about such sadness feels like something hidden and secret, as if you only know about it if you go to a special school. To watch it being portrayed on television, then, almost feels like such hidden sadness which everyone else has been allowed to ignore, has been released into the open, so that everyone else can now witness the things I encountered in my childhood.

My friends had different types of MD to the one Marnie supposedly had on the program; and to my knowledge their families did not have to go through any legal proceedings. Nonetheless, Best Interests reminded me what Muscular Dystrophy is and what it can do: it is a horrible, horrible disability, sapping away a child’s strength so they can’t even lift their hands to touch their face. A lot of the time they suffocate under the weight of their own fucking chests. MD tears the heart out of loving families, leaving mums, dads, brothers and sisters with nothing to do but mourn. It is the one disability I loathe above all others; one which has deprived so many young people I have known the chance to live long, full lives. Watching it’s devastating effects being played out in this series brought that feeling of injustice and powerlessness back to me: all we can do is watch as these once thriving, energetic, joyful kids fade and die, both on television and in harsh, cold reality.