HE was the maverick celebrity doctor known for pushing his body to extreme limits in the name of science… and making good TV.
Now the final experiments by beloved Dr Michael Mosely air tonight on Channel 5, just two months after his tragic death on the Greek island of Symi.
The body of the late TV star, 67, was discovered after a five-day search and rescue operation that spanned sea, land and air after he left pals on Saint Nikolas Beach to walk back to his hotel.
Tributes flooded for Michael, also famed for popularising the 5:2 diet plan, including from friend Jeremy Vine who said he was a “born communicator” with “an adult mind, a child’s curiosity”.
The father-of-four‘s wife of 37 years Dr Clare Bailey touchingly said her husband remained “ever-present through the lives he touched and the difference he made”.
TV viewers will remember Michael’s brilliance tonight in the first of his new three-part series Michael Mosley: Wonders Of The Human Body and in one segment, he touched on a lifelong fear.
He took a revolutionary test that predicts the danger of heart problems in the next eight years, which revealed his arteries were starting to clog up – and he was “looking at a ticking timebomb, a potential heart attack coming down the line”.
He said: “I am feeling a little bit nervous… I’m really quite concerned about what they are going to find out. Like many others, I’ve lost loved ones to heart failure including my dad who died when he was just 74, that’s only eight years older than I am now.”
The test revealed he was low-risk of heart attack in the immediate future but needed to be careful. Michael said: “I have a 94 per cent chance of making it to 74 and therefore a 94 per cent chance of beating my dad.
“It’s not perfect so there is still some risk… I’m not going to go away and eat cream buns [but] you can’t imagine how relieved I feel, I was lying awake last night thinking about it.”
Previously, Michael mourned his father Bill saying he “hadn’t seen his grandkids grow up” and he decided “that’s not a road a want to go down” so drastically overhauled his health.
Sadly, Michael passed away in June from natural causes but his legacy lives on through his dedication to science and improving the nation’s health, often through experiments on his own body.
As Dr Sarah Javis, who worked with him on The One Show, said: “He said that by using himself as a guinea pig, he could make more difference than many doctors make in a lifetime.
“The ideas that he first brought out, he helped bring into the mainstream of health are now there and they continue to make a difference to the quality of people’s lives.”
He once admitted “celebrity crept up on me” – most notably after an episode of Horizon named Eat, Fast and Live Longer, which popularised the 5:2 diet.
The intermittent fasting diet advocates eating 500 or 600 calories for two days and a “normal” amount for the other five and spawned two books – the 2013 book The Fast Diet and, six years later, The Fast 800 Diet, which advocates a low-carbohydrate Mediterranean diet, fasting and an 800-calorie-a-day eating plan.
It also launched a 20 year TV career, which saw him put his body through extreme conditions for research purposes – including swallowing tapeworms, serving as a host for leech and lice, and experimenting with psychedelics.
Heartbreakingly, she described feeling “incredibly lucky” to have spent 37 years married to her beloved Michael.
In June, she spoke about being “breath-taken” by how the public had responded to his passing and felt he was kept alive by his impact on the world.
Clare said: “While we are learning to live without Michael, he is ever present through the lives that he touched and the difference he made.”
The mum-of-four admitted it was “very hard” trying to piece her family’s lives back together after Michael’s death and offered a different side on the star, not seen by the public.
Clare said: “He didn’t seek the limelight. He was quite shy, but loved what he did and was very good at it.”
Amid a flurry of tributes – ranging from TV broadcaster Jeremy Vine to the former Labour MP Tom Watson, who credited Michael with helping him lose weight – Clare was touched to discover so many people “really loved him”.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “To be honest, I’m still kind of breath-taken by the response from people across the country, across the world.
“It’s just extraordinary. He was quite a sort of quiet, humble man, and to have that sort of response is just extraordinary.”
She pays a special tribute to her husband in tonight’s episode of Michael Mosely: Wonders Of The Human Body, which is the first in a three-part series.
Clare says: “One of Michael’s biggest passions has always been to reveal the extraordinary secrets of how our bodies work, to help us understand and look after them.
“He spent several months with the production team, travelling far and wide for the making of this brand new series”
Notably in 2014, Michael turned viewers’ stomachs as part of a series where he swallowed three tapeworm cysts – taken from infected cows in Kenya.
Alongside the larvae, he also gulped down a pill camera, which sent live images to his iPad and would later show three worms attached to his stomach lining.
The experiment, for Michael Mosley: Infested! Living With Parasites, sought to track the effects of what it was like to live with the worms inside the human body.
Recalling the incident, he said: “When I first saw [images of the] the worms, I was in an Indian restaurant. I shouted out, ‘Blimey! There’s a tapeworm in me!’
“The other diners looked very surprised. I was delighted but at the same time, it was rather horrible.
“My wife wasn’t too keen on the idea either but I told her not to worry – this particular tapeworm is relatively innocuous.”
In an interview with the Daily Mail, he added: “Clare said, ‘I don’t want to share a bed with it’, so I took a pill to kill it.
“The other guy who swallowed a tapeworm for the same experiment didn’t tell his wife and the first she knew was when it crawled down his trouser leg as they were driving along in the car.”
There aren’t many people who would be pleased to hear their visitor is infested with lice.
Michael
Michael said the worms – which can grow up to 10 metres in length – didn’t cause him any issues apart from gaining 2.2lbs (1kg).
At the time, there were reports of tapeworms being used as a risky weight loss procedure.
He said: “It could be that the parasite increased my appetite. I ate a lot of chocolate. So anyone who is thinking of popping parasites as a weight-loss device should think twice.”
In the same series, Michael allowed a leech to suck blood from his arm while discussing how the parasite is still occasionally used in modern medicine to improve blood flow and treat blood clots.
“I definitely feel it,” the TV doctor said moments after its jaws locked into him. Later, he reflected: “There was blood everywhere when I took it off.”
They revealed the leech’s weight had increased from 0.4g to nearly 3.4g from his blood, which Professor Iain Whitaker said would be the equivalent of a human gaining “115 to 120 stone after one meal”.
Michael added: “I wouldn’t recommend buying something on the internet and infecting yourself.
“Heaven knows where it’s been. Some people get better, some get worse, it appears. And we never seem to hear from the people who get worse.”
Shockingly, in other documentaries, the presenter has also injected vials of his blood with snake venom and malaria to watch how they affect cells.
Another experiment saw Michael visit a de-lousing salon in North London and let the parasites latch onto his skin.
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While heading to the lab to film the creatures at work, he admitted: “There aren’t many people who would be pleased to hear their visitor is infested with lice.”
There they studied how head lice have perfectly adapted to grip onto human hair and watched as Michael’s blood pumped through its gut.
The episode likely led many to question if there was any TV experiment Michael wouldn’t do and later, he revealed his wife Clare can “veto” some of the stunts.
“I do run things past my wife, who is a GP,” he told The Shopshire Star.
“She is very accepting about these things, although sometimes she will say she’s not sure. When they wanted me to be infested with pubic lice, for example. She does have a veto.”
It wasn’t just creepy crawlies that Michael experimented with.
In 2011, he got high on the magic mushroom psilocybin, which is a Class A drug, as part of a clinical trial that analysed the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics.
During a chat while under the influence, he said: “I’m just a little over my head okay… you just take off and you can sort of make the sky appear and then you can zoom off.
“I’m probably about two or three feet off the chair at the moment, I feel incredibly light… I feel very floaty, I feel like if I really wanted to I could levitate to the ceiling, although I don’t want to.”
Later, Michael said: “That was like going into hyperdrive on Star Trek.”
In 2015, Michael tucked into black pudding made from his own blood for the documentary The Wonderful World Of Blood.
The show explored centuries-old remedies about the restorative effects of blood consumption and by Michael’s own admission, the experiment took “a playful, ghoulish” turn.
Holding up the creation, he said: “Not very attractive looking but I managed to get two black puddings out of 330ml of my blood. This should actually be pretty nutritious, with plenty of protein, lots of vitamin C and iron.
“Blood is really quite calorific, in fact, there’s almost twice as many calories per ml of blood as, say, beer.”
After taking a bite of “black pudding a la Michael”, he said: “Mmm, not bad, could do with a bit more salt, I obviously don’t have very salty blood. I don’t think it’s going to take off as a national dish this.”
In 2016, Michael reluctantly started smoking e-cigarettes for a month to assess the damage it would cause his body for Horizon.
He admits his first reaction to being asked to try it by a producer was “hell no” in a Times interview because he “hated cigarettes”.
Eventually, Michael worked up to taking 120 puffs a day at a moderately high nicotine dose – which he said was the equivalent of what a heavy smoker may inhale.
He concluded that the e-cigarettes “could prove to be a game-changer” and “one of the great inventions of the age” – but added: “I have no desire to ever take another puff again.”
After that, Michael continued to appear in documentaries about diet, sleep, consumption habits and cosmetic procedures including the ‘vampire facelift’.
He said that by using himself as a guinea pig, he could make more difference than many doctors make in a lifetime.
Dr Sarah Jarvis
Away from the cameras, the TV star lived a quiet life with his wife Dr Clare Bailey, whom he met while studying medicine.
He enjoyed up to “a glass or two” of red wine five nights a week, ate “everything in moderation” and rather than heading to the gym in his free time, cycled the near-10-mile journey to work.
The one pitfall Michael admitted was chocolate, with him being “known to steal my daughter’s Easter eggs and have to replace them”, which he jokingly branded: “Sinful.”
Despite having a theatrical style in front of the camera, the father-of-four insisted he was “no showman” and refuted claims he had become a later life sex symbol.
Typical of his dry humour, he said: “I don’t see myself in that role. I can’t imagine anyone throwing their knickers at the stage. If they did, I would throw them back, for sure.”
The first episode of Michael Mosley: Wonders Of The Human Body airs at 8pm tonight on Channel 5 and is available to stream online after.
