Onwards and Sideways Turns Five Good Years Into a Joke

Paul Mayhew-Archer was 58 when a neurologist gave him Parkinson’s and five good years. He turned the line into a joke, then into a film.

Laura Linney and Rhys Ifans play two strangers who get that same morning in Onwards and Sideways, the 110-minute comedy-drama John Madden takes to Toronto on 13 September. Icon Film Distribution opens it in the UK on 6 November, before BBC One and BBC iPlayer.

He Was Told He Had Five Good Years

Mayhew-Archer, the co-writer of The Vicar of Dibley, was diagnosed in 2011. The neurologist remarked that his face looked stiff, as if smiling had become hard. Mayhew-Archer said that could be because he had just been told he had Parkinson’s.

He has told the next beat for years. The doctor offered five good years, and he went home to his wife Julie pleased at the thought of five decent ones in a row. By January 2025 he said he was 14 years on and doing well, after deep brain stimulation about a year earlier. The film still runs on the old clock. It follows Emma and Tony across the five good years their neurologist predicts.

That is the gag hiding in the title. The man who wrote it has already lived past the ending he was offered, and he has been mining the gap for jokes since he walked down the clinic stairs. In a 2023 conversation with Parkinson’s Europe, he said he remembered thinking, “This is funny,” before he even reached the street.

In 2011 when I was 58 years old, I was told I had Parkinson’s. It’s incurable and it makes many of the things I do, walking, talking, smiling, increasingly difficult. But though I have reasons to hate Parkinson’s it has also brought me opportunities I wouldn’t have missed for the world. The latest of these is the chance to work with the brilliant director John Madden, and wonderful actors on bringing this story to life. So, thank you Parkinson’s. My fingers may fumble, my mouth may mumble and each step I take may result in a stumble. But I cannot grumble.

Paul Mayhew-Archer, writer and executive producer, John Gore Studios announcement

He thanked Parkinson’s for the chance to make the film, in the same run of lines that admits walking, talking and smiling have got harder. The gratitude and the stumble sit in one breath, which is the tone the trailer is selling.

A Script That Kept Getting More Serious

The idea is older than the shoot. In 2016 he was already talking about a rom-com in which two people fall in love at Parkinson’s ballet classes, the same year BBC One aired his documentary Parkinson’s: The Funny Side. He later took Incurable Optimist to the Edinburgh Fringe. The feature that arrives in 2026 spent years in draft under the working title But When We Dance.

In January 2025, speaking as the project was still aiming to shoot later that year, he said he had been working on it for five or six years, and that each draft grew a little more serious as the illness progressed. The comedy did not leave. The temperature dropped.

THE WRITER’S CLOCK

1. 2011: Diagnosed at 58 and told he can expect five good years.
2. 2016: BBC One airs Parkinson’s: The Funny Side; he is already writing a dance-class love story.
3. 2018: Takes Incurable Optimist to the Edinburgh Fringe.
4. March 2023: Joins the Movers and Shakers podcast with Jeremy Paxman, Rory Cellan-Jones, Mark Mardell, Gillian Lacey-Solymar and Sir Nicholas Mostyn.
5. January 2025: Says he is 14 years on, after deep brain stimulation, with drafts that have grown more serious.
6. 22 October 2025: John Gore Studios, Hilltop Screen and the BBC name Linney and Ifans.
7. 20 July 2026: TIFF places the film in Galas; new stills go out.
8. 2 September 2026: The BBC releases the trailer.
9. 13 September 2026: World premiere as a TIFF Gala.
10. 6 November 2026: UK theatrical opening through Icon Film Distribution.

He is in the cast as well as on the call sheet as writer and executive producer. The person who has been living past the five-year line is also, briefly, inside the fiction that still uses it.

Emma Goes Public While Tony Guards His Job

Linney’s Emma Dretzin is a pianist, composer and single mother of two daughters. Ifans’s Tony Evans is deputy head of a primary school. They do not know each other until they walk into the same clinic on the same morning and leave with the same diagnosis.

Emma answers with a tremor and a plan to raise awareness. Tony shows no clear symptoms at first and treats disclosure as a threat to his post. The film lets those two instincts sit in the same room, then sends both of them to a Parkinson’s ballet class.

TWO DIAGNOSES, TWO FIRST MOVES

Monica Dolan, from Mr Bates vs The Post Office and Sherwood, plays Liz as Tony’s sister. Rory Kinnear plays Professor Ridge, the neurologist who sets the five-year frame the rest of the plot has to live inside. Leah Byrne, Danielle Galligan, Isabella Nefar and Emma Louise Webb round out the company.

Ifans is an executive producer as well as the lead, which puts a star who has to hide a diagnosis inside the group that decided how that hiding would play. Linney, a three-time Oscar nominee, is the one who can afford to go public on screen because Emma’s work is art, not a county school. The job is the pressure point. A deputy head with Parkinson’s is a management problem before he is a patient.

The Ballet Class Started in His Own Life

The dance class is not a late sentimental add-on. Mayhew-Archer has used ballet as treatment and as material since the documentary, including classes in Oxford that he has described as central to how he lives with the disease. In 2023 he told Parkinson’s Europe he was still rewriting the dance-class love story and that a new joke for it could lift a bad day.

Publicity for the finished film now pairs that class with a taste for adventure. The BBC’s own synopsis talks about humour, music, movement and connection, and about finding joy when the future narrows. Madden, the Shakespeare in Love director, said he wanted a friendship that unfolds without warning, with humour, bravado, music and dance, and that he wanted to get past the usual assumptions about a condition few people think they understand.

Hilltop Screen shot the picture in North Norfolk. Norfolk Screen, the county film office, said after the trailer landed that the production filmed entirely there. The map is coastal and ordinary: school corridors, a clinic, a hall with a barre. Thomas Newman, Madden’s regular composer, wrote the score. Hilary Bevan Jones and John Gore produced for Hilltop Screen, a John Gore Studios company, with the BBC. Kaleidoscope Film Distribution is selling the film worldwide, with CAA Media Finance handling North America.

WHAT HE MADE BEFORE THE FEATURE

• The documentary: Parkinson’s: The Funny Side went out on BBC One in 2016 and mixed stand-up with treatment science and that Oxford ballet class.
• The stage shows: The Funny Side of Parkinson’s and Incurable Optimist, including a 2018 Edinburgh run and a set at the World Parkinson Congress.
• The podcast: Movers and Shakers, recorded with five other people who have the condition, named UK Podcast of the Year by the Broadcasting Press Guild in March 2024.
• The honour: He was made MBE for services to people with Parkinson’s, then kept writing the film that uses the line he was given at 58.

Lindsay Salt, the BBC’s director of drama, called the script a film with a huge heart, a sense of humour, and a clear purpose, and said it shines a light on living with Parkinson’s. Bevan Jones said the pages made her laugh, cry, and think about what life still offers. Those are launch-day lines. The writer’s own record is blunter. He has said Parkinson’s gave him a subject, and that people with the condition are hungry for jokes about sex, bowels, freezing and the rest of a list he puts at 40 symptoms.

Toronto Gets the World Premiere on 13 September

The 51st Toronto International Film Festival runs 10 to 20 September 2026. Onwards and Sideways sits in the 2026 Gala Presentations programme as a United Kingdom world premiere, in a slate TIFF rolled out on 20 July beside titles from Pedro Almodóvar, Danny Boyle, Chris Rock and Mike Leigh. A Gala slot is a bet that a British comedy-drama about Parkinson’s can hold a room that also came for biopic heat and star vehicles.

The BBC put out the official trailer on 2 September, ten days before that screening. Schoolchildren appear in the footage alongside Linney and Ifans, which is the part of Tony’s life he is trying not to put at risk. There has been no loud argument yet about whether Parkinson’s belongs in a comedy, because the jokes have not been tested in a hall. That argument usually starts after a first audience decides if the laughs are coming from the condition or at the people living with it.

https://x.com/bbcpress/status/2095097988053926055

Mayhew-Archer was 11 years younger than the current UK average age at diagnosis, which Parkinson’s UK puts at 69. One in 16 people with the condition were under 50 when they were told. Over one in three were still of working age. Tony’s fear about the school is not a side plot. It is the demographic the charity keeps putting in its tables, written as a man who still has a job to lose.

When Onwards and Sideways Opens in the UK

Icon dates the theatrical opening at 6 November. BBC One and BBC iPlayer follow later in the year, which is the path that will actually decide how many people see it. A US date has not been set, even though the producers have said cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic are part of the plan.

Parkinson’s UK now counts around 166,000 people in the UK with a diagnosis, and says someone is told every 20 minutes. The charity’s 2025 study, built from millions of patient records, put new diagnoses that year at around 28,000 and projected 173,000 people living with the condition by 2030. England accounts for 139,000 of the present total, Scotland 14,000, Wales 8,600 and Northern Ireland 4,400. John Gore’s own announcement used the 166,000 figure and the 20-minute clock when the cast was named.

WHAT WE KNOW

• Toronto: World premiere as a Gala on 13 September 2026.
• UK cinemas: 6 November 2026, Icon Film Distribution.
• BBC: BBC One and BBC iPlayer later in 2026, date not set.
• Length: 110 minutes, shot in North Norfolk.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• US opening: No date announced, despite talk of a theatrical run.
• BBC slot: No transmission date beyond later in the year.
• How the jokes play: No public audience has sat through the 110 minutes yet.

The first public audience meets the film in Toronto on 13 September. Icon then puts it into UK cinemas on 6 November, before BBC One and iPlayer take it later in the year, still with no US date on the board.