David Lowe (a.k.a. Lewis Adler)

David and I have been friends since his days on BBC Radio Devon & Cornwall. In 1992, I was his guest on the Sunday Late Show over several weeks. My first time was the week before his D-Day anniversary show. This is chronicled in my book “At This Point in Time”.

As a D.J. and show presenter, David has had an interesting career, including national news coverage about a complaint about the N-word in a song from the early 1930’s. One complaint…

(Did you even hear it? I didn’t.) But to quell the controversy, David offered to resign from the BBC. They accepted. Then the newspapers had a field day, since other presenters (like Jeremy Clarkson) had done the same without any consequence. This was back in May of 2014. It seems to me that the ‘cancel culture’ took an early hostage.

By the time I knew David, he had a slight tremor in his right hand. It made for a tricky job lining up records on the turntable, which was made easier by the takeover of CDs in musical history. But David has always worked through his physical restrictions. And now, all these years later, he is acting in TV dramas, such as an episode of the BBC’s “Doctors” this past month. He had previously been on ITV’s “Casualty” eight years ago. (He sent me an abridged video file of his “Doctors” performance, and I must say that it was masterful.)

Yesterday, I discovered Lewis Adler’s YouTube videos. Here is the one I shared on Facebook:

This is an excellent example of David’s ‘one-in-a-million’ voice.

Here’s the other video:

That bio-bit about David being a rock musician earlier in his life may be a hint as to why he’s got dystonic tremor now.

The cause of dystonic tremor isn’t really well known, but it doesn’t seem to be degenerative – so cells aren’t dying in the brain. It might be the fact that a little damage has been done – a tiny blood vessel gets blocked off. Or alternatively, we see it in patients who might have a specific profession like bricklayers or musicians, where they’re doing a repeated action that they don’t think about – repetitively. Interestingly, what causes the tremor is this dystonic phenomenon and dystonia is something that you may not have heard of, but you will have heard of dystonic conditions, such as writers cramp or torticollis. So torticollis is where the neck is twisted off by contractions of the neck muscles. Whereas writers cramp, of course as you’re writing the hand goes into a spasm.

Prof. Simon Lewis

Anyway, I just wanted to share this with you, as it is important to see past the disability, to the man.

Bless.