Bedlam Channel 4 9pm ‘Anxiety’.

In the good old days when a gentleman was not too busy bear-baiting or slaughtering foxes, he would sometimes take his young lady to Bethlem Royal Hospital, or the colloquially know Bedlam, to observe the performance of mad people. The Maudsley in South London is the old Bedlam. This is Jeremy Kyle lite.  Here the cameras followed four patients who suffered from a variety of anxiety disorders. Helen, aged 33, had been stuck in her house for two years because of her fear that she’d stuff strangers she’d met, and not yet met, into rubbish bins. CURED? Leon, aged 55, the oldest of the quartet, did not allow his face to be filmed. He’s a vegan whose belief in bodily contamination had spiralled out of control. CURED? His type of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is perhaps the most common. Another patient suffered from a similar complaint, but I can’t remember his name, which is quite worrying. As the head honcho of the unit explained OCD is a type of bullying thought that takes over people’s lives. They ritualise this thought in behaviour. Opening and shutting doors so many times. Endless cleaning routines that become increasingly like something from Gormenghast. The head honcho’s example of an intrusive thought was when he drives to work he passes a school with a lollipop woman and cute little kids lining the road. He sometimes feels like knocking them over like skittles. If this had been Jeremy Kyle I’d have booed. This was the only insincere part of the programme. He did explain that three out of four on their unit showed improvement, but let’s face it, Jeremy Kyle also offers counselling to the poor peole on his programme, but I don’t know if it’s based on cognitive modelling, or the elastic term of managing the disease. I’m sure he could come up with the same sort of figure.

 The star of the Bedlam unit was James. He was young, floppy haired, wool knit jumpers and skinny, probably because he spent at least seven hours in the toilet a day because of his obsession with shitting himself and smelling of shit. James had dropped out Exeter University studying drama to become the centre of a drama. James hated everything about himself. What was quite impressive was the access his upper middle class family allowed to their home. James’s mother, in particular, was forthright about the problems James’s illness has created. As I know from experience, having someone with mental illness in the family drives everybody else plain bonkers. James at the end of the programme is filmedgoing back to his studies at Exeter. CURED? – he was wearing a soft floppy hat, the kind favoured by Spencer Tracey in the 1950s! I know he’s a student, but I’d an intrusive thought he looked like a plonker and I wanted to laugh, but manfully stifled it. But I’ve got this dreadful obsession with writing everything I see down.