Clemency Burton-Hill, 43, was born in Hammersmith, London, and brought up by her mother, casting director Gillian Hawser, alongside her two older half-brothers. She has performed internationally as a violinist, acted, written five books, worked as an arts journalist, and been a regular BBC classical music presenter and broadcaster since 2008. In January 2020, she suffered a brain haemorrhage caused by an abnormal connection between arteries and veins in the brain. A new BBC Arena film, My Brain: After the Rupture, about the experience and her recovery and aphasia, will be shown this Friday. She lives in Washington DC with her husband, James Roscoe, and sons Tomos and Joe.

My Brain: After the Rupture is an astonishingly honest film about your brain injury. How would you describe it?
The reason it exists isn’t because I suddenly thought I’d like to have a documentary about my absolute fucking nightmare. Sorry! I do swear these days. At no point have I been one of those people who feels as if I hold any interest. But as a journalist and a broadcaster who had lost all my ability to speak and to write, I did realise that I had this unbelievable privilege to tell this story.

In what sense?
Unlike most brain injury survivors, I had a platform, or knew how to get the wheels turning, in terms of telling people how something like this could happen. I also had this very strong sense of wanting to do something useful for the community of people who have had brain injuries, especially as we still don’t know what is going to happen to me ultimately, or anyone else.

This documentary gets incredibly raw and personal at times. Was it important to you to show the toughest moments?
It felt really important that none of this was sugar-coated. Yes, what happened to me was extraordinarily rare and random and weird and wild, and here’s where all the platitudes and cliches come out, but we just don’t know how long we’ve got. We don’t know what is going to happen in five years or five minutes.

But there is hope in your film, too, especially when you start playing your violin again.
Yes, we didn’t make a film to make people depressed. I didn’t want people to think, oh God, I’m going to have a brain injury [too], so I’m going to go away and just watch kittens on the internet instead!

The film also shows your deep anxieties before your injury, which surprised me. You always seemed so perfectly polished on radio and TV.
Oh God! I wasn’t. This might sound weird or show-offy, but live TV was my safe space. Going into the studio and seeing the on-air light go on – all my other worries went out of the window. And then I was in my favourite place talking to playwrights or musicians or actors or scientists, knowing I could depend on my curiosity, and I guess my very lucky… well, I wouldn’t call them talents. I never felt that I was talented at anything.

Really?
I’ve never felt that I’m worth much. People would always sort of scratch their heads at who I was, especially early in my career. They’d be, what are you? Who are you? I thought you were a journalist, but now you’re an actor, and now you’re doing projects in Rwanda, now you’re playing violin. Why?

Why not?
Being a young woman, it was also a bit, “Get in your fucking box”, maybe, because you don’t get to be all these things. But I also kept thinking about my burning interest in human beings and how they live and why and, whether I was speaking to people as a journalist or playing with them as a musician, that drove me on. Even though I was never sure of my sense of self – and I didn’t think I deserved good things – I was always interested in other people.

Your father, Humphrey Burton, the BBC’s first head of music and arts, is in your documentary, although you didn’t have a relationship until your 20s. How did he influence you?
Obviously it looks like, well, you went to the BBC to do arts and music because of your dad. It’s almost painful to hear that because he was not in my life at all. And then there’s my name, which cages me as this ridiculously posh person when I’ve always tried very hard to make [classical] music accessible to everyone. But with my dad… well, it turns out genes are incredibly powerful things.

What music do you love that surprises people?
Nineties hip-hop, drum’n’bass and garage – I got decks in my mid-teens and tried to be a DJ, but I was bad. Which is ironic given what I ended up doing later in life!

You made a Radio 3 documentary last year with conductor Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, in which Israeli and Arabic musicians play together. Do you believe music can overcome political differences?
I believe music can go to places that words will never be able to reach. There’s this kind of atomic force when you’re hearing music or witnessing it together as performers or as an audience. For me, music has always been a kind of shorthand into an extremity of experience or a magical sense of understanding. It’s sort of sublime. I remember the first time I read Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, loving it, and thinking, this is how I felt watching Radiohead at Brixton Academy!

You’ve been an Arsenal fan since you were six. How do feel about this season? They’re unlikely to win the Premier League now.
Really sad. Mikel Arteta and Declan Rice are my angels. But you know, there’s this weird kind of parallel, which again might be ridiculously presumptuous, but I feel as if I take so much comfort and solace in the ups and downs in football. If you’re a real football fan, you know there are times you just aren’t going to win. Also, can I just thank Arsène Wenger, Tony Adams and Ian Wright?

For any specific reason?
They sent me the most incredibly motivating and moving videos in hospital. This was in the early days of Covid, which meant I had to be in total isolation and no one could come to see me. You know, I haven’t got any tattoos, and one of them might be “Choose life”, which has been my sort of mantra, but the other would be “Arsène knows”.

How can music help people?
I feel as if I’ve been banging on about these things for so long, but as someone who used to say, “Oh, I couldn’t live without music”, I can say now, given how much it’s helped my recovery, that music can save a life, too. I really believe that the arts, generally, but particularly music, tap into something very innate in us. I also love that you can’t put any old music in a glass case. It’s always an evolving thing because every time a new pair of human ears hears it, it goes on. Music is almost like a joy transmitter – a sort of miraculous thing that we all have access to.

• My Brain: After the Rupture is on BBC Two, Friday 28 March, 9pm