This heartbreaking documentary looks at a decades-long battle with drugs and alcohol that’s torn the musician’s family apart. It’s a moving look at how it’s affected not just him, but his wife too
Matt Willis: Fighting Addiction begins with the Busted bass players’ wife, Emma. In their big, light-filled house in Hertfordshire, the TV presenter opens a drawer that tends to remain shut. She retrieves a diary she hasn’t read since she wrote it in the run-up to their wedding in 2008. It contains, she says with a tight smile, “notes of what I knew he had consumed”. She reads a couple of entries: “bottle of champagne … couple of wines … couple of wines … another bottle of champagne.” The words “and more” refer to drugs. There are entries for every single day. “I used to drive around looking for him,” she says, welling up.
It sets the scene for this intimate, often tearful exploration of Willis’s decades-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction. A story of the ricochet back and forth between relapse and sobriety that focuses as much on Emma’s pain as Willis’s. Celebrity addiction is a well-trodden subject, but less explored is its devastating impact on families. Willis’s film, in which he sets off around the country and into his own past to try to find out why he is as he is, is in equal parts Emma’s film. His last relapse happened when the youngest of their three children was 10 months old. His first words to camera are about his wife: “I’ve hurt her so many times I don’t know where to begin.”
Matt Willis: Fighting Addiction aired on BBC One and is available on BBC iPlayer.
