Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo prescribe the real feel-good movies

Together, these podcast giants are the Florence Nightingale of the cinema. Here they give their cinematic advice for a variety of ailments...

If you need to get some sleep 

Kermode: “The perfect movies to sleep in are the Transformers films. I remember sitting in the press screening of Transformers 2 thinking, ‘I am going to fall asleep.’ They are so boringly noisy."

Mayo: “The movies for insomniacs are films where nothing really happens. The Piano… Empire [Andy Warhol’s eight-hour film of the Empire State Building in which literally nothing happens].”

If you’re Donald Trump

K: “I would lock him in a room with You’ve Been Trumped on repeat. It is a brilliant piece of work – the story of Trump coming to this beautiful area of Scotland with the intention of ripping it up and turning it into a golf course."

If you need to throw up

K: “Problem Child 2 will do the job. There is a sequence with kids on a merry-go-round; one spews and then all the other kids spew."

If you’re Jeremy Corbyn

M: “Battleship Potemkin. If Corbyn comes to power, it’s the only cinema we’ll be allowed to watch.”
K: “The Ploughman’s Lunch: a very interesting film about the public positioning of people’s politics.”
M: “I’ll add Labor’s Turning Point – The Minneapolis Truck Strikes of 1934: A Rank And File Story.”

If you have a cold

M: “I Drink Your Blood: it’s a Seventies horror movie about Satanist hippies who inject rabies into pies."

If you want to avoid contracting an evil virus

M: “Don’t have extra-marital sex with Gwyneth Paltrow.”
K: “In Contagion, Gwyneth Paltrow has had extra-marital sex and so the world is going to end. Someone coughs into a tissue, and the camera looks at the tissue, and then somebody else touches the tissue. It’s a very paranoia-inducing thing.”
M: “Don’t have extra-marital sex with Gwyneth Paltrow. I have stood by that moral all my life."

If you’re Vladimir Putin

K: “Cruising and The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.”
M: “Pride.”
K: “It is entirely possible that Vladimir Putin could come across Pride and then be swept away by the majesty of the film and re-think his homophobia."

If you have swine flu

K: “You can’t focus on anything. If you can watch an entire film, you're well."

The Movie Doctors is out now; £20, Canongate.tv. The tour runs 17 October-13 December

[Images: Jay Brooks]