Confessions of a Brain Surgeon is shockingly masochistic

Perhaps the most striking moment in Confessions of a Brain Surgeon, a documentary filled with striking moments, is when a woman tells the noted surgeon Henry Marsh that she has hated him for the past 29 years.

“We blamed you for Max’s death,” Max’s mother, Tina, tells Marsh, who sits and listens, thoroughly humbled. Tina reminds him – though Marsh needs no reminding; he remembers perfectly well – that Max, aged five, had an aggressive brain cancer that Marsh considered himself “one of only two people in the world” to be able to help with. (Marsh to Tina now: “Goodness. Did I really say that?”) Tina tells him that he was “gung ho” and “arrogant”. It was in this state of supreme self-confidence that Marsh performed surgery on young Max, successfully.

But the tumour grew back. Max died. “I hated you,” she says.

In an era where television is filled with medical documentaries, Confessions of a Brain Surgeon is unusually compelling fare. Now 74, Marsh says he wants to “return to confront the past” and the result makes for discomfiting but utterly gripping viewing.

Marsh has long been the UK’s most celebrated brain surgeon, and has routinely appeared on our television screens for his pioneering work. Now that he has retired, he isn’t any less fond of being in front of a camera, but this is no greatest hits collection of his work. Instead, it’s an extended mea culpa. Marsh explains that while he has performed thousands of successful procedures over the years, it’s the ones that go wrong that haunt him, forming “gravestones in my inner cemetery”.

There’s a pertinent reason for his late-arriving empathy. Marsh has recently become in need of doctors himself, after a diagnosis of prostate cancer. “I realise now how horrible it is being a patient,” he says. “It’s demeaning, frightening.”

He really is the most intriguing character: studious, obsessive and geeky behind a pair of round glasses that keep sliding down the bridge of his nose. He speaks in pure RP, and is quite eccentric but also clearly brilliant at what he does.

That brilliance came at a cost, however. He was a workaholic for decades, and when eventually he did go home, he did DIY around the house rather than spend time with his wife and children. “I wasn’t a good father,” he admits. His marriage ultimately fell apart.

Good access is the key to all great documentaries, of course, and this one has some terrific interviewees. There’s not only Tina, happy to berate the elderly doctor on camera, but also Hilary, Marsh’s first wife, who confirms – much to his squirming discomfort, sat alongside her – that, yes, he was “arrogant” and “absent”, and that she suffered for it. “I’m sorry,” he says.

A programme this critical would ordinarily need to be unauthorised, so Marsh’s willing involvement here is almost masochistic. He has done so much good in his career, yet he can focus only on what went wrong, and how he is to blame. His repentance is almost biblical.

He continues to travel the world giving lectures to young doctors, and it’s at a café in war-torn Ukraine where he admits he’d much rather die here, under a Russian bomb, than “slowly, from prostate cancer, or dementia, like my father”.

But Marsh doesn’t die in Ukraine. He comes home, still alive, still haunted by the past. He does his DIY, and tends to his garden. Of his cancer, he says he is “not phlegmatic, but frightened and upset”. At one point, he tells a colleague: “I’m not godlike at all. I make mistakes.”

“No,” she tells him, “You’re human.” This film proves that he is. Warts and all.

‘Confessions of a Brain Surgeon’ is streaming on BBC iPlayer