Dr Connolly I presume?

Published on Friday 6 April 2007 01:15

AS HARD as it may be to believe, there is a convention in journalism that writers should try to get their facts straight. It is for this reason that trainees are taught always to check the spelling of an interviewee's name, and if they wish to be particularly polite, how said the subject would like to be titled. Then, and only then, should they get on with the harassment.

But with Dr Pamela Connolly, this is not the simple opener you would expect.

"Ah well, now. That's the hardest question," she says with a laugh. "What is my name?"

The New Zealand-born psychotherapist isn't going senile, it's simply that there have been a number of different Pamelas throughout her adult life.

First of all, there was Pamela Stephenson, the bombshell comedienne of Not the Nine O'Clock News fame who, along with Rowan Atkinson and Mel Smith, shaped the satirical comedy movement of the early 1980s. One of the first female comedians to breakthrough in Britain she was at once a feminist icon and sex symbol, and had further US success as one of the Saturday Night Live ensemble.

Then, in 1989, she became Mrs Billy Connolly, and faded somewhat from the public consciousness when Pamela moved to Los Angeles with her husband to raise their children.

And now, finally, she is Dr Pamela Connolly, licensed psychotherapist. Having abdicated her comedy crown, Stephenson enrolled in a psychology class and discovered a different career, about which she is very passionate. After six years of training, and 3,000 clinical hours, she gained a doctorate in clinical psychology and set up a successful practice in Beverly Hills.

It's this professional Pamela who has been reintroduced this week, through her Shrink Rap programmes on More4. The five-night series features Dr Connolly interviewing five different celebrities - including Sarah Ferguson, Stephen Fry and David Blunkett - in a therapeutic manner.

Although this is not televised psychotherapy - and Connolly is quick to mark the distinction between professional sessions and these conversations - the series displays these figures at their most psychologically vulnerable, discussing personal matters in greater detail than we have previously seen.

Ferguson admits to wishing she were a child, Fry discusses both the sexual experiences of his teens and his suicide attempt, and Robin Williams - whose interview completes the series tonight - openly muses on his masturbation fantasies and the nature of his drug abuse.

It has made for fascinating and intelligent viewing. Those familiar with Stephenson's comedy will be surprised by the serene, insightful and empathic Dr Connolly who gently guides these troubled stars on a journey into their psyche.

"This is much closer to who I am," says Connolly when asked which of the careers feels more natural. "I never really felt I was very funny personally, I mean I enjoy a laugh, but I'm not like Billy who is so naturally funny. So the famous, wacky image that was attached to Pamela Stephenson didn't really feel like me.

"But psychology was the obvious thing for me to move into, because I've always found it incredibly fascinating. There was an element of it with my interest in comedy - which stemmed from an interest in human behaviour. Psychotherapy is just a different way of viewing the same subject. In both you are looking for people's vulnerabilities, but it's what you do with the perception that is different. I find it fabulously interesting."

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that Connolly is so intrigued by fame - she has made it an area of specialist professional interest, along with sexuality - given that she lived a decade in the limelight, and is married to one of the most globally celebrated Scots. But her specific take on the effect of fame is revelatory, and one has to assume her theory - which she discusses in great detail - is shaped primarily by her own, not entirely positive, experience.

"It is my understanding that when someone becomes famous, another part of the self emerges. That 'celebrity' self is idealised - it's better, more exciting and more perfect than the true self. As the gap between those two selves widens - which, with increasing success it inevitably will - it becomes very uncomfortable and makes the psyche very unbalanced."

Which might explain why these five celebrities appear on her couch, disclosing weaker, more defensive personas than we normally see.

But isn't there a more fundamental problem? A deeper, sociological issue surrounding our appreciation of celebrity that drives this existential crisis?

"Well it's no surprise that celebrity status means what it does," says Connolly. "Celebrity isn't just played out in the media. Kids learn about it in school, when some are given prizes or singled out for achievement. Of course children then grow up thinking that this identification is the goal.

"On a grand scale, we believe that when we become well-known, all our problems will be solved. We'll have all the money we wanted, all the love we ever wanted, and that it will never go away. But we don't realise that fame changes every relationship in your life, and that it has no real permanence. You have to work twice as hard to maintain fame than you do to attain it, because people take pot-shots at you simply because you've acquired it. It becomes a hollow victory."

If Connolly's motivation for Shrink Rap was to dispel the myth that celebrity satisfies, she has succeeded. Perhaps the most telling example was that of Fry, who appeared as the most deeply troubled of all her subjects. After agreeing on his probable qualification for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, the pair went on to debate whether a teenage sexual experience - in which a first-form Fry was unexpectedly "buggered" by a sixth-form prefect - counted as sexual abuse. Fry adamantly denied it was abusive, saying instead the boy was "charming" and "very nice about it". Connolly was obstinate in her categorisation of it as a negative, hurtful experience, and asserts that until Fry accepts it as such, he will never begin to heal. It was not an easy interview to watch and, judging by Connolly's combative style, no easier to conduct.

"Stephen has attentional issues," she says diplomatically. "He is rather like Billy in that he will fly off and become quite tangential. But his brilliance and the architecture of his brain makes it a little difficult as a therapist to keep him on track.

"If we had been in therapy, we would have the time to go along with his resistance [to the notion of abuse], listen to what he had to say, and then maybe weeks later he would come to the same conclusion.

"But in this situation, a conversation, I decided to challenge him on it only because he had written about it in a very different way to the way he presented it on camera.

"I needed to join with the part of him that does feel bad about what happened. If I had joined in with the part of him that is using humour as a defence against feeling the pain of that, I would have lost his trust."

It is the one interview in which Connolly looked genuinely shaken, and with good reason: the ground covered mirrored the childhood of her husband, Billy. The sadness of his childhood is now common knowledge thanks to the biography she wrote with him in 2001, Billy. As therapeutic as it may have been for Billy - who also has ADHD - one has to wonder if such an in-depth psychological study didn't alter the balance of their marriage.

"The book was actually a very healing thing for both of us," she says. "A lot of people get to know their spouse, but don't have the opportunity to chronologically go through childhood events and hear those stories in such detail. It was a wonderful experience.

"We hadn't discussed those things when we first met - we were too busy shagging - but coming back to it later also helped because without my psychological training I wouldn't have put it together the way I did. We both got to understand him a lot better as a result."

Connolly clearly feels at home with her psychotherapist self, and when asked if she's happier now than back in her days of comedy glory, she takes no time to confirm it: "Oh yes. Absolutely. Definitely."

But as she is driven off to her next media interview, one wonders whether this exercise has not also been about asserting herself as an equal to Billy. Now that she is able to promote her more comfortable self - the professional academic who offers empathy not cynicism - the limelight doesn't feel so destructive. And if that results in more of this intellectual, stimulating television, we should be happy to welcome her back.