It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of John’s Not Mad on public awareness. Though TS was first described a century before by the French neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette, attention paid to the condition was restricted to specialist medical journals. “It has been so little known that until recently few doctors had ever heard of it,” the Guardian’s first report on the condition in 1978 noted. That all changed with the documentary, broadcast at a time when the vast majority of the country only had access to four channels, and viewing figures were far higher. The broadcaster Ben Bailey Smith, who had just started secondary school at the time, remembered the documentary being “huge … Everyone in the playground was quoting him.”