In the summer of 2015 Charly Clive started to feel faint. Not ill, never ill, but odd. Wrong. Her periods had stopped, and she lived in New York in a fog of pregnancy scares – finishing drama school and working as a nanny, she was putting off an expensive medical bill. So it wasn’t until she was home in her parents’ Oxfordshire village for Christmas that she finally decided to investigate – first with a trip to the optician, to ask about the blind spot in her peripheral vision, and then a blood test with her GP. By the time she was admitted to hospital, aged 23, her brain tumour was the size of a golf ball.
Her blind spot was a pituitary adenoma, and she’d been staring at it for five months. “I’d never been sick,” she says. “I was fine. Except, that whole year I’d felt numb. More sarcastic than usual, quite cynical, rather than my usual irritating optimism. Turns out, because the tumour was on my pituitary gland, I couldn’t regulate emotion. I didn’t crack a single joke in 2015.”
We are meeting three years later, and a redirected plane means Charly’s return home from New York this time has already involved a taxi to London from Liverpool and the misplacing of all her luggage. Nevertheless, she’s chirpy and delightful, ordering wine in her only clothes this side of the Atlantic. She talks about waking up on an intensive care ward in the tone of a bawdy anecdote. “I asked the nurse: ‘Where’s Britney?’ And she was like, ‘Is that your sister?’” She thought Charly was talking about her best friend Ellen Robertson, who’d moved in with Charly’s family upon diagnosis, and was responsible, in hospital, for serving tea and high spirits. “But I explained: ‘No, that’s the name of my tumour.’” At which the nurse, “the very sweet nurse”, smiled kindly and moved on.
As she recovered from her operation (and, after Britney’s return, the subsequent radiotherapy), she and Ellen contemplated alternative diagnoses. What if instead of a tumour, she’d gone into the doctor’s and he’d told her there was a small Welsh village living on her pituitary gland, and unfortunately it would disrupt too many lives and traditions to displace it? What if when she walked into the room, it was a detective agency, and she was being sent on a secret mission? What if it was a Hollywood office, with two producers pitching a sitcom called Tumour Humour? She was laughing for the first time in months. Her parents were delighted. So, when she and Ellen started writing it up into a sketch show (“We played every part including the tumour”), her dad suggested they take it to Edinburgh that summer. At home, they started rehearsing Britney, the dark and life-changing story of Charly’s tumour. But, funny?
At that point, she didn’t know that Britney would change her life twice.
Last year, casting for a lead to play a girl with OCD in Channel 4’s drama Pure, producer Jen Kenwood auditioned hundreds of actors. Nobody was right. Handling the complex disorder – “pure O”, a controversial term used to describe patterns of repetitive thoughts and disturbing mental images – the actors all veered towards melodrama. And then she happened upon a clip of Charly online, an unagented, unknown comedian describing Britney, which was now touring the UK after selling out Edinburgh.
“When Charly auditioned we knew she was the one,” says Kenwood, partly because “her own personal experience of being ill was a resource that she could tap into.”
Pure is inspired by Rose Cartwright’s memoir – Rose cried when she saw Charly’s audition tape: “She connected with the suffering and the humour in a natural way.” The first episode opens in Scotland at an anniversary party while, mid-speech, she tries to fight the images that swell inside her head. The hall becomes a writhing mass of bodies: her mother, her father, her grandma, her friends, no longer politely sipping white wine in their best cardigans, instead heaving into each other in a sweaty orgy. She needs to escape.
Moving the next day to London, into a school friend’s cupboard, she fumbles through a series of crises to gather a ragged new gang around her, including a porn addict and deceptively cheery HR manager, and tries to work out what’s wrong with her. Even in the most stressful of situations, she must try not to imagine the room naked.
Since she was 15, Rose had been consumed by violent sexual thoughts, self-harming and becoming suicidal, questioning, at times, whether she was a paedophile. After self-diagnosing with OCD, she launched into a journey of therapies, first with a counsellor who tried to get her to come to terms with a presumed latent homosexuality, then with psychodynamic therapy, where she was encouraged to analyse the root of her thoughts. It made her worse.
Eventually she received cognitive restructuring therapy, and found an OCD specialist in New York who gave her therapy on Skype, in which she was exposed to explicit sexual images. “I was a studious patient,” Rose writes, “diligently watching porn three times a day for months and months. I watched so much porn I could identify the production company by the luxuriance of pubic muffs.”
Gradually, her life became more manageable, though unlike the narrative arc of a TV series, Rose’s story has no clear happy ending. “The global story bias has no truck with the grinding tenacity of mental illness,” she writes in Pure. “When was the last time you saw a drawn-out soap opera storyline in which someone spent years bottling something up before finally mustering the strength to confide in a loved one, and then literally NOTHING CHANGED?”
And yet as an account of the terrifying slog of OCD, her memoir was welcomed as a valuable reminder of how tightly mental illness is sewn into the human experience, and how getting better can mean many things.
“I was apprehensive,” admits Charly. “It was my first job. And I was worried about getting it wrong – I’d always thought OCD was washing your hands a lot, I didn’t understand the weight of it. It was only when I talked to Rose about her intrusive thoughts that I had any real concept of what she’d been going through.”
Charly has always had a tic, of sorts: she has always grinned when she’s uncomfortable. She did it when the doctor told her she was sick; she did it when rehearsing a therapy scene in Pure. She’s grinning now. “Sometimes I get a look from my mum that says, ‘Please don’t do another joke.’ But when the humour goes away, that’s when you’re asking someone for help. It’s very British to open with a joke, isn’t it? And I could relate to that with my tumour stuff – you want it to be easy for everyone else, so you don’t tell the whole truth. I didn’t want anyone to worry, or treat me differently… Deflecting with goofiness.”
Rose did the same with her own OCD. “I acted a character most of my 20s, to hide what was inside,” she tells me. “Anyone who’s concealed a mental health problem will relate to that. Charly acts a girl acting her way through life, acting within acting. It takes real subtlety and emotional intelligence to do that.”
Watching her pain revisited has had an unexpected effect on Rose, largely because of Charly’s empathic portrayal. “It’s been curiously healing to see Charly reimagining familiar emotions on set. She’s brought so much likability and nuance to such a fucked-up character; she’s helped me see myself with more objectivity and kindness. She’ll do that for many others, too.”
As Charly has discovered, pure O (a term which OCD UK avoids, saying it’s imprecise as no forms of OCD are “purely obsessional”) is difficult to talk about without making people panic. “People suffering just think they’re a deviant and often never discover how to manage it.” And if they do start to describe the wetlands of their minds, the violent sexual thoughts upon the sight of somebody eating a banana, the images that flash through their minds upon meeting a friend’s new baby, it’s another jump to explain: “This is not a crazy, hectic sexual rollercoaster, it’s horrible insecurity and obsessive compulsive disorder. Even when you take those words individually they’re horrifying. Put them together and combine them with the sexual thoughts, it’s an awful taboo cocktail. How can that be funny?” She pauses, finishing her drink. “Because people are funny.” And then, of course, she grins.
Pure starts on Channel 4 on 30 January at 10pm
