A little while ago the boy came home from school and said, upon receipt of the usual daily request for information about his day, that he'd watched a film in class.

The film, he told us, was about a man who wasn't allowed to see his children. Ah, we thought. This is one of those health and social awareness lessons they have these days, in which everyday problems and issues are discussed.

We had nothing like that at primary school, and I think it's very laudable that young children are given early warning of the types of mistakes their parents made so they can utterly avoid them.

A man barred access to his children was, we thought, a pretty weighty topic for a film, but something the boy's classmates might well have had experience of. But there was more.

It transpired that the man in the film had been banned from seeing his children because he dressed like a woman. Our minds boggled a bit at this one; it seemed a fairly specific issue to tackle - man has secret transvestite tendencies, is discovered by wife who promptly divorces him and blocks his access to their children.

We wondered why the film had been shown. Was there, perhaps, someone in his class to whom it was relevant? I began to wonder which of the dads I often met at the schoolgates had such predilections.

"It was well funny," the boy further informed us. I was just about to tick him off for poking fun at such a sensitive issue when something suddenly occurred to me.

"This film..." I said slowly. "It wasn't by any chance called Mrs Doubtfire, was it?"

"Yes," he said, and wandered off to do something else. So not a social issues film at all, but a quick comedy to keep the kids quiet.

Mrs Doubtfire, of course, was indeed about a divorced man who wanted to see his children. He wasn't banned from seeing them because he dressed like a woman, but rather dressed like a woman so he could pose as a nanny and have access to his kids.

It's very funny. It also stars Robin Williams, who this week sadly died in what appears to be the result of him taking his own life due to struggling with severe depression.

Robin Williams has given me a lot of laughs over the years. I can remember thinking the episode of Happy Days where his alien character Mork was introduced was, quite frankly, the best piece of TV I had ever seen at that tender age. I left the cinema with a tear in my eye after Dead Poets Society.

Depression is a terrible thing, as is any mental illness. It's often something that is hugely misunderstood or massively under-rated by those of us lucky enough not to have such problems, but there is no doubt at all that battling inner demons takes its toll in ways only the person suffering can really understand.

So those social issues lessons in school are a pretty good thing. As, now I think about it, is watching Mrs Doubtfire in school lessons.