Turning trauma into award-winning art
Life Changing
BBC
4.6 • 804 Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As a young man, engineer Michael Ashcroft was plagued by excruciating headaches, along with neck pain and a rushing sound in his ear. Eventually scans were made revealing a tumour the size of a tangerine behind his left ear. It required twelve hours of complex surgery and left Michael with temporary deafness in one ear, a lopsided face, limited swallowing and barely any capacity for speech. Seeing his face reflected in a hospital window he was appalled and at the same time profoundly moved. Half his face was in daylight, the handsome young man who had entered the hospital a few days before. The other half, in shade, looked to him like a monster. In an instant he had an overwhelming desire to capture that image, and to do that he would become a painter – drawing comparisons to the industrial artistic genius of L.S. Lowry.
Michael talks to Dr Sian Williams about the challenges of recovery, and describes his determination to teach himself to paint.
Producer: Tom Alban
Transcript
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| 0:10.8 | In 2025, we were here for the entertainment. |
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| 0:37.6 | You're about to listen to Life-Changing. |
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| 0:50.5 | Hello and welcome to the series that hears from extraordinary people who've experienced a moment in their lives that's transformed everything. |
| 0:59.5 | Sometimes that moment is etched in suffering, yet something new and quite beautiful emerges from it. |
| 1:06.6 | So it was for Michael Ashcroft, an international award-winning painter. But that's not where he started. His spark of creativity came in a sudden and rather dramatic way. Michael joins me now. Hello. Hello. How are you? Nice to meet you. And nice for you to come down. Thank you very much. You're a Lancashire lad, I'm from, I'm from Lancashire. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great |
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