It must be a tad worrying for patients at the Birchfield Hospital in North London to know that one of their doctors treated them while hearing voices in her head. At least it would be if Birchfield Hospital existed, which as far as Google and BT directory inquiries know, it doesn't. The imaginary hospital was part of the considerable subterfuge deployed by Leo Regan, the director of The Doctor Who Hears Voices (Channel 4), to keep hidden the identity of “Dr Ruth Fielding”, a young doctor who probably suffers from schizophrenia.

Not only was Ruth Fielding not her real name, but while everyone else appeared as themselves in this extremely unusual, hugely intriguing documentary, Ruth was played (quite brilliantly) by Ruth Jane Eyre Wilson, who used medical records to improvise her scenes. The reason for the secrecy is that “Ruth” is back working in the NHS.

This was a result for her doctor, Rufus May, who is either so wrong about everything that he should not be working as a clinical psychologist, or a pioneer of a new approach to insanity. May's tactics are not to be confused with the legendary R. D. Laing's, who felt that calling in a doctor to treat madness was like calling in a TV repair man because you do not like the programme you are watching. May accepted that Ruth was ill but not that she should be treated with drugs. Instead he encouraged her in her manic state and engaged with the voice inside her that was telling her she was being followed, that she was worthless, and that she should kill herself.

Some of the re-enacted sequences smacked of The Exorcist. Voice (speaking through Ruth): “I'm like a prophecy.” May: “We'll resist that prophecy.” Voice: “I'll fight you. You are a bloody do-gooder.” May wanted to know who the voice was: a parent, a psychiatrist or perhaps her brother who had died of a heart attack when he was 14? When he found out that it was a bully from her schooldays, May, as Regan noted, seemed almost giddily pleased with himself. He found it hilarious, too, that he had excluded the film-maker from this crucial leg of the therapy.

May was a worrying character, and not just because at 18 he had himself been schizophrenic (he does not accept the term) and lied to be accepted for training as a clinical psychologist. Even he accepted that he might have “a chip on his shoulder” about all this and, when Ruth briefly disappeared, he seemed ready to believe she might have killed herself: 1,200 sufferers do so every year; another 50 kill someone else. Yet he may have been right to insist that her delusions were not mere “word salad” and held symbolic meanings wherein a key to her healing might be found. The trouble was that by the end, although Ruth was better, her voices were as loud as ever, something she did not tell her superiors. May's response was: “So what?”

In an alternative life as an investigative reporter, Leo Regan might have commandeered a front page to expose the NHS for harbouring this woman on its staff. Instead, his clear-eyed, worrying film assaulted our conceptions about the treatment of insanity. Although using drugs to douse down the symptoms of madness is by no means a cure, Regan clearly remained unconvinced that May had the full answer either. I'll forgive him for mocking up a NHS sign reading “Birchfield Hospital”. But when it comes to the ethics of May and Ruth conniving to get her back on staff by lying about her mental condition, I can't suppress the tabloid voice in me that whispers: “They stink.”

A more convincing talking cure was in evidence in Dr Pamela Connolly's speed-therapy session with Joan Rivers on Shrink Rap (More4). Rivers is not a secretive soul, so it took no special skill to get her talking intimately, but Connolly did impose a workable narrative on a chaotic and unhappy life dominated by rejection, financial crisis, her husband's suicide, her therapist's death from Aids, and, increasingly, the plastic surgeon's knife.

Connolly identified a pattern of betrayal, a diagnosis at which Rivers happily grasped. She was less willing to take the doc's medicine, which was to stop acting as if her body was “betraying” her by getting older. “It's not going to get any Christmas cards from me,” she said. Rivers has her own patent cure: wisecracks.

Out of the Box

My first reaction to the changes at BBC News, in which the idents' black backgrounds have changed to white, BBC One's bulletins have been moved into the same studio as News 24 (whose set now boasts an engraved Perspex window) and BBC News 24 has been renamed BBC News (or “BBC News Channel” on the website)? You don't get much for £550,000 these days, do you?

James Corden, who co-writes and stars in Gavin and Stacey, was on Sky News over the weekend scoffing at the thought that his sitcom could compete with Cranford, The Apprentice and Strictly Come Dancing to win the Bafta audience award, which is voted for by viewers not an industry panel. Gavin and Stacey is shown on BBC Three, the others on the main channels and are seen by millions more. Yet win it did. As one of the judges who nominated it, I am delighted he got it so wrong.

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