Music

‘I’d been stuffing my face with jacket potatoes,’ said Brian Harvey. ‘They were big. I put cheese on, then tuna mayonnaise and I ate the lot.’
It was May 31 2005 and Harvey was enjoying a late-night potato feast at home in Walthamstow. At around 1am he left to drive to a friend’s house and promptly got lost. As he backed his Mercedes convertible out of a cul-de-sac, the baked spud overload was making him feel queasy. He opened the door to vomit on the road. ‘Instead of putting my foot on the brake, I hit the accelerator and it flew back,’ he said. ‘It must have hit four or five parked cars and thrown me out of the car.’

He was flung on to the road and somehow got crushed between the open door of his car and a wall, forcing him under his own vehicle, which was by this time rolling at quite a speed. Harvey managed to crush his pelvis in six places; his stomach was pushed into his chest, resulting in one of his lungs collapsing; doctors reported that his leg was broken so badly that it was turned in completely the opposite direction. Feature continues

Neighbours heard his screams and alerted the emergency services who arrived at 1.53am. He was rushed to Whipps Cross and then to St Thomas’s where he spent seven hours in surgery. It was more than six months before he was able to walk again.

The bizarre event was assumed by many to be another suicide attempt: earlier that month he’d taken an overdose of sleeping tablets and a month earlier he had been treated for clinical depression. The previous authmn he’d ejected himself from ‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’ following the death of his grandmother and a furious argument with fellow contestant Janet Street-Porter. He’d also been hounded by a tabloid which accused him of supplying cocaine (he received damages after being found not guilty). But Harvey denies any suggestion of suicide. ‘If you were going to kill yourself you wouldn’t do it like this,’ he said. He also confirms that he has not been able to eat a jacket potato since.