From drug addict to documentary-maker... Darren McGarvey on turning his life around
Darren McGarvey could be a lost cause. He could still be addicted to drink and drugs. He could even be dead. When he was f ive, his mother went for him with a bread knife, before his father managed to stop her. She injected drugs in front of her kids, dug up the dead family pet and set the garden furniture on fire. Despite that, and after f ighting his own addictions, McGarvey became an award-winning writer, TV presenter, activist and occasionally a rapper who goes by the name of Loki.
The Loki of Norse myth is a trickster who relishes causing chaos. While growing up on Glasgow’s f irst large-scale housing scheme in Pollok, McGarvey was in and out of trouble. He was addicted to drink, drugs and junk food, and had anger issues and low self-esteem. “I spent my 20s partying, playing a role for people, because I wasn’t sure who I was,” he says. A decade ago he was, by his own admission, an angry young man, a “passionate, confrontational campaigner” who perceived the world in black and white.
Now 40, McGarvey is hosting his first network series, The State We’re In. The three-part exploration of the justice system, education and the health service, which ends this week on BBC2 and is all available on iPlayer, is an ambitious dive into the state of our public services.
But how did that angry and lost young man come to present a hard-hitting BBC documentary? In 2015, after a long period of being clean, he started drinking and taking drugs again, behaved in a threatening manner on social media and ended up in a police cell. He had a whatthe-hell-am-I-doing-here? epiphany and, within a few years, changed his life completely.
McGarvey has variously been described as “a diamond in the rough” and “an outsider” who relishes challenging the establishment. He became a prominent campaigner in Scotland on issues around poverty and, over the following years, appeared on Start the Week on Radio 4 and BBC1’s Question Time, which he says he didn’t enjoy: “It’s a horrible experience, especially in the current cultural climate.” In 2018, his debut book, Poverty Safari, which explores the experience of poverty and its legacy, won the prestigious Orwell writing prize. His intention was, he wrote, to “resonate with people who feel misunderstood and unheard”. He went on to present BBC Scotland documentaries that examined class and addiction (the latter winning 2022’s best factual series at the Bafta Scotland awards).
McGarvey prides himself on being unusual in the world of documentaries, in that he’s a working-class bloke talking to other working-class people. “There isn’t a class barrier between myself and the contributors. I understand the situations they’ve faced.” At one point, when he’s visiting a prison in Glasgow, an old mate shouts at him fro
