TVScope: Compulsion - Love Will Tear Us Apart BBC2, Wednesday, May 11th, 9pm
Are we living in an addictive society? That was the thought which hit me when watching this documentary about a couple struggling with multiple addictions.
Matthew and Camilla are two people with posh accents and a heroin addiction. Matthew is also addicted to alcohol and gambling. Camilla's addictions and compulsions include cleaning, spending and sex with strangers.
It's easy enough, then, to bracket Matthew and Camilla off as two marginal people. Yet each of these addictions is now available to us to an extent that has never been the case before. A heroin addict could walk up any Dublin street and make a purchase within five minutes. Drink is cheap. You can gamble 24 hours a day. Cleaning is a traditional addiction and is available to anyone with a roof over their head. The combination of credit cards and TV shopping channels means you can feed a spending compulsion without leaving your living room. And people who want sex with strangers can contact each other over the internet or by putting an ad in a newspaper.
Other readily available compulsions and addictions include over-eating, under-eating, and internet pornography.
The point of this list is not to lament the state of the world - it is to suggest that the Matthews and Camillas are neither weird nor all that different. They have latched onto more behaviours than most people latch onto at one time, that's all. They are similar to the rest of us in other ways too.
When they go to live in a therapeutic community in Kent to try to get clean, Camilla makes quick progress while Matthew lags far, far behind. Camilla, no less a sinner than Matthew, then becomes a saint and disapproves strongly of Matthew's behaviour. If you've ever gone from being a bit of a slob to being a fitness bore then you've made Camilla's sinner to saint shift.
I am not sneering at Camilla. On the contrary, her change in attitude, being such a human pattern, made her, for me, easier to identify with.
While she was doing well, Matthew's struggle was painful. He crashed in a big way when a large grant cheque came through and he went on a gambling and drug-abusing spree. By now, Camilla had already thrown him out.
Throughout the programme he was ruefully aware of his capacity to slip, he came back from a visit to a therapeutic community in Ireland full of assurances he had recovered, and suffered remorse when he went back to his old ways for a time.
They had begun their stay in the therapeutic community on a high note. For the first time in their lives they both wanted to get well at the same time, she said. Matthew added that they both wanted recovery for themselves and not just for the sake of the children. The welfare of their two children was clearly a strong motivation for both of them.
The birth of a third child seemed to bring them together again and, as the documentary ended, Matthew had moved back in with Camilla. As the credits rolled, we were told that 11 months later they were "doing well".
Let's hope it's true.