Roman Kemp: Are You Really OK?

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But then, in the pandemic, my best mate Joe took his own life and it turned my whole world upside down. The 30-year-old, who has hosted his own breakfast show on the radio station since 2017, lost his colleague to suicide in August 2020, aged 31.

Kemp read a lovely thing in a self-help book after the tumours – that “every cell in your body is replaced every seven years. Roman shares all the experiences that have shaped him, and why love, marriage and having his own family one day are so important to his future dreams.

How he got his career and the jobs he did in the past, he is very open and honest and the book was very well written and a great read. Kemp meets a group of teenage males from Northern Ireland whose friend – Carl, “the class clown” – died in May 2020, aged 15.

The reality is the contents (or at least the first two thirds of it, I'll get to why I didn't finish it) consist of some basic discussion of the topic but I actually felt the effectiveness of even this was undermined by the way in which the author switches to discussion of random things that have happened in his life, many of which being subjectively amazing experiences many could only dream of. Roman is open and honest about his own struggles, very honest and I think that is because he knows by being honest it will help people. The grief he went through, and even his own mental health was played out brilliantly and now the work he does to support Mental Health Charities, everything was there for us to see and I really found his program heart warming. The man is the person that has to have a family, has to find the perfect person and be happy with them, have kids and help them financially.At the time, he barely knew if he was “walking left, right, walk over here or walk over there … I knew that I had to do it, not for any other reason but to cure my brain of the leftover effects of the trauma that I’d been through.

He also teamed up with Edge Hill University, Lancashire, taking part in a panel discussion analysing mental health. Now that he is mostly playing himself – in books, and in all those reality TV shows and presenting roles – he feels much better about being recognised. Possibly the best part of the book I read was that in which he shares his experiences of his friend and colleague dying by suicide. In the documentary, the 27-year-old says he had “no idea” the fun-loving guy he saw as a brother was struggling with his mental health. Kemp thinks he gets his approach from his own father, a printer, who was encouraging and nonjudgmental.

Capital FM star Roman Kemp will discuss his fight with depression since the age of 15 in his new book ‘Are You Really OK? You can see why the idea of self-renewal appealed, because on top of the health worries, being unable to work plunged his family – by then he and his wife, Shirlie, had two young children – into financial difficulty.