Television - Andrew Billen looks at our fascination with real-life breakdowns

In drama, there is nothing so compulsive as watching a human being crack up. Think Medea, Lear, Macbeth and Gabler. But in a documentary, self-destruction is harder to watch. Issues of human dignity and voyeurism arise. This is why the television event of the year will probably remain Vanessa Feltz's temporary madness on Celebrity Big Brother, because, between her penchant for public self-dramatisation and the programme's ultimately larky format, viewers were permitted not to take it too seriously. Mental disintegration is now just another game-show format and, let's be honest, who is watching ITV's Survivor or the new Big Brother on Channel 4 for anything else?

In recent weeks, however, the posher end of television has taken to documenting the real thing in a succession of fly-on-the-wall documentaries about drink and drug addicts. The latest, and most reassuring, began on 30 May. The four-part series Inside Clouds: a drink and drugs clinic (9pm, BBC2) is a sober, dispassionate, semi-educational account of the Wiltshire country mansion where, despite its celebrity reputation, two-thirds of rehabs are paid for by the NHS. The first episode followed three addicts, Sarah, Peter and Cordelia, all of whom had agreed to let the cameras follow their treatment. (A few faces were blurred out in the background but, remarkably, most patients had obviously also given their consent to be filmed.) Of the three, Sarah was the most interesting in terms of the grammar of the programme. Her counsellor, Peter, who had been an addict for 30 years himself, acutely spotted that she was an inveterate performer. Socially skilled when relating to the other patients, she smiled a wide, wide smile, even when she cried.

She admitted it was a relief when Peter saw through it. After he confronted her, she said: "He made me feel I'd built a stage set and had the costume and everything." And, in a sense not acknowledged by the programme, she had. She had let Gabe Solomon's documentary team in to witness this performance. Should television have provided her with this stage? Was TV part of her cure?

Having David Nath's camera follow a former advertising industry journalist called Brian Davis certainly did not cure him. An alcoholic and manic depressive, Brian, like Sarah, was a TV natural. Fatally, Cutting Edge: Brian's story (8 May, Channel 4) fell in love with the articulate 55-year-old Cambridge graduate who described every day as a "combination of French farce and pure Tarantino". Nath had spotted a good story, but so, one felt, had Brian, who knew the copy it would make if he could pull himself out of this nosedive and actually get that elusive interview with Polanski in Paris. What he had not considered was the copy it would make if he did not.

Brian's sales pitch was optimism, but his life pointed all one way, as Nath and Channel 4 must have realised at some point. In the end, he fell to his death from the roof of a cheap London hotel, Nath having done no more to prevent it than most of Brian's "friends" (save the blessed relative who gave him his own place in Liverpool to wreck). Nath's brutish objectivity got so close to suicidal mental illness that I wanted a futile gesture from him, at some stage, to salve the conscience of us viewers. It is a perverse tribute to his honesty that he did not provide us with one.

The Channel 4 documentary Cold Turkey (21 May) starred yet another over-articulate media performer, Lanre Fehintola, a photojournalist who, ten years ago, deliberately became a heroin addict in order better to record the world of drug addicts and dealers, but who never managed to kick his addiction. I did not see Leo Regan's original film about his friend, which must have spent more time on his work and his decline, but last month's follow-up, three years on, was almost entirely based in his flat, where Fehintola was attempting to detox over seven days.

In place of Nath's hands- off approach, Regan was involved, rooting for Fehintola and became increasingly frustrated. "Take your pain and shut up about it," he shouted, and I could have kicked the set for his naivety in thinking that a detox can be accomplished DIY with a little help from your friends, rather than in a properly supervised environment such as Clouds. We heard a lot of agonising from Regan about whether the cameras were helping or hindering Fehintola's progress, but he kept on filming regardless. In the end, Fehintola was admitted to a residential rehab programme. "The thing that gave me real hope was that he did not want the cameras there this time," Regan concluded, with astonishing gall.

These edge-of-society stories need telling, but not in this unmediated way. I have a nasty feeling that the cheap new technology will bring more and more of them to the screen until, finally, we watch a nightly video diary of suicide. Inside Clouds, at least, is structured like a proper documentary series rather than a soap opera. There is still, however, a diligent analytical documentary to be made about the history and efficacy of the 12-step programme. It is time, as they say in these places, for a little less acting out.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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