The condition, which included an involuntary compulsion to utter obscene and explicit remarks, had seen his previously normal life turned completely upside down, with many of those around him failing to understand why his behaviour had so suddenly and dramatically altered.
That's one of several memorable moments dramatised in the new film I Swear, an adaptation of Davidson's life written and directed by Kirk Jones. Jones had seen the aforementioned John's Not Mad when it first aired, and kept a close eye on his life ever since, eventually going to meet him at his home in the Scottish Borders town of Galashiels a couple of years ago.
"I felt really strongly that there was an interesting and unique film to be made about his life story. I was just fascinated by the fact that John is such a lovely, wonderful man, but when he opens his mouth, what he says can really anger, upset and concern people.
"I just felt like the combination of the humour – which is inherently part of the condition – as well as the upset and the tragedy that John had encountered throughout his life was a really interesting mix for a film."
"I didn't know anything about John," he says. "It was only afterwards I found out that he's, like, enormously famous. Which is probably a good thing!
Aramayo is joined in the cast by a number of other familiar faces, including key roles for Shirley Henderson as John's mother Heather, and Maxine Peake and Peter Mullan as two kind-hearted locals who – in their different ways – help Davidson come to terms with his condition and begin to live a more regular life.
"I remember talking to Jack about his process [at the time], and he said, 'Well, I've been studying John Davidson and John's Not Mad, the documentary,'" she recalls. "I was like, 'I love that documentary!' So we got chatting and he said, 'Do you know there's a follow-up documentary?' And he got me the DVD for a birthday present!
"So when I first met John, I was a bit starstruck. I feel like there's always been a thread that John Davidson has popped up in my life somewhere. So when the script came through, my agent went, 'Oh, and there's some information about...' And I went 'I know about John.' And I think a lot of people in my generation, he did have a big impact on them."
"I thought it was incredible," he said. "I was only on [set] for three days, and what absolutely blew me away was how the crew had said to me, 'You know he's staying in character?' And they didn't say it with any judgment – nobody was rolling their eyes.
"So he's in the physicality of the character – he didn't mentally take that on, that's Looney Tunes – but he stayed in the physicality of the character. So as you were talking to him as Rob he was talking with a Scottish accent, but he had the tics, which then meant that when they shout turnover and action, you are already in that groove."
John agrees, and they end up meeting in the back of her parents' car, with the pair almost immediately letting out a torrent of abusive insults and other explicit remarks. After a minute or so, they look at each other and share a laugh – visibly healed by the experience. It's a brilliant scene, and one which Jones included after seeing similar interactions in documentaries.
View oEmbed on the source websiteHe adds: "She is able to mask her Tourette's at times, and when we put the scene together she needed to be relaxed enough to express her Tourette's, and in particular coprolalia – the type of Tourette's which only 10 per cent of people have, which is where you swear.
Aramayo is also full of praise for Bisset's performance in the scene.
"It sort of felt like a tone setter or a sort of pin in the map of, like, we can go there to that place. And I was so thankful that we did it so early on in the process, because then we were constantly referring to it as we were shooting."
"I've had lots of friends who've texted and said, 'Oh my God, this film looks brilliant... this looks like something that I really want to watch,'" she says. "And I think there's a real desire for these kind of stories that are very personal, those sort of British independents.
Meanwhile, there's been one response to the film in particular that Mullan was especially moved by, which came after the film premiered in Glasgow last month.
"And when I spoke to these girls, one of them had never been to a cinema before – and she would be a young girl of 19 [or] 20. She'd never been to a film before. And that, again, never occurred to me. And I think what I love about the film... it makes you become very aware of what it is to live with that condition."
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