This powerful and moving Cutting Edge film follows 20-year-old Simon Hales on a remarkable journey through rehab, as he and his family come to terms with the challenges of life after brain injury.

A popular undergraduate at Newcastle University, Simon was on a night out when he and a friend tried to climb back into a nightclub they'd been thrown out of by mistake.

In the dark, Simon fell 20 feet and landed on his head, suffering a severe brain injury. He was lucky to survive, but it took Simon five weeks to wake from his coma.

Simon may look more or less 'fixed' on the outside - he is walking and talking relatively normally - but on the inside he is battling with a new and less compliant brain. And his family wants to know when they will get the 'old' Simon back. But nobody can say - with brain injury, the doctors just don't know.

My New Brain follows the progress and the struggles Simon and his family face as he's treated in a brain injury rehabilitation unit and begins his first visits home.

As well as remembering nothing of the accident, or the weeks and months before, Simon needs constant attention; his mood swings violently and his mum, Jane, says it's like having a toddler all over again, but in the body of a 20-year-old.

Your brain is like a blancmange – fall 20 feet and the likelihood of it not looking like runny egg is slim. That is more or less what happened to Simon Hales, the 20-year-old star of this moving Cutting Edge documentary. Simon was a normal, popular and bright student at Newcastle University. But, on a night out, Simon and a friend were ejected from a nightclub with disastrous consequences.

Rather than going home, Simon decided to try and climb back into the club. In the pitch black darkness, Simon fell off a 20 foot high wall and landed on his head, suffering severe brain injury. Lucky to survive, he subsequently spent five weeks in a coma. When Simon eventually woke up, he was very different…

“The Simon who woke up was so very definitely not Simon,” says Simon’s mother, Jane. Though he looked like Simon and appeared ‘fixed’, Simon was a changed man. His brain was no longer able to compute the simplest of tasks and his memory was almost non-existent. He could no longer remember the details of his life, the very details that made him who he was. Simon almost becomes a toddler again, needing assistance to brush his teeth, and no longer possessing the social skills he once had.

Stripped of the endearing traits that he was so loved for, both Simon and his family must come to terms with this new personality. Cutting Edge follows Simon’s recovery, from trying to remember the route to the supermarket to returning to his old digs in Newcastle and the site of his ill fated accident.

Simon’s journey is poignant and touching. He feels trapped living in a residential care unit (seeing his family infrequently), and he becomes increasingly frustrated by the bad hand fate has dealt him. His recuperation is slow, and it is unlikely he’ll ever fully recover. His toddler-esque qualities also make him prone to violent mood swings.

“The better Simon was getting, the angrier he was becoming” – he doesn’t quite rip his clothes of and turn bright green, but Simon becomes rather volatile, threatening to kill his mother’s dog and even punching his younger brother in the face. Mother Jane is a frequent recipient of Simon’s four letter tirades and anger venting (all done behind an empty smile), and you will really feel for her.

The show ends on a positive note though, with Simon slowly gaining some semblance of his old self. But, he must stop living in the past and look to a future that must be considered a second chance. This is a tender and touching documentary, and well worth watching.

METRO TV review: My New Brain was a touching story about a young man's battle to come to terms with the 'pointless' mistake that left him comatose.

Sam Wollaston The Guardian, Thursday 26 August 2010

Weirdly, his sense of humour seems unaffected ... Simon Hales in My New Brain.
Simon Hales, star of My New Brain (Channel 4), was, by all accounts, a very nice young man. A student at Newcastle University, he was popular, easy-going, funny, smiley. He still can be – sometimes – but he's not the same nice young man he was before his fall. During a drunken night out, he fell off a wall. And although from the outside it looks as if all the king's horses and all the king's men did their thing successfully, inside Simon's not right. He suffered a serious traumatic brain injury.

Simon was in a coma for five weeks; then when he came round, he wasn't all there. Now his memory is terrible. He forgets everything – who people are, why he went to the supermarket and how to get home afterwards. His concentration is hopeless; he can't plan or organise anything. He obsesses about things, especially his accident and his coma. He has violent mood swings and an irrational hatred of his mum's lurcher, Spider. Spider's lovely.

This touching, human film – a poignant picture of how brain injury can affect someone and his family – follows Simon for several months of his rehab. It's incredibly frustrating, for Simon of course, but also for his mother and brothers. To George, 17, Simon was a big brother, someone to look up to; now George is helping him to clean his teeth and get into bed. There's something very sweet about that. And sometimes George gets a punch in the face for his troubles. It's like having a naughty toddler in the family again, in the body of a 21-year-old.

He does make some progress though - there are flashes of the old Simon. Weirdly, his sense of humour seems unaffected. Actually I have no idea what it was like before, but he's pretty funny now – dead sarcastic, but sharp as you like. "Don't fiddle with anything," his poor mum says to him in the car. "You're fiddling with my fucking life," he fires back. Sometimes there'll be a hug though, for mum or for George. And Simon still has a lovely smile.