Mum, Heroin and Me (Channel 4)

The conventional trajectory of a documentary about drug abuse follows a subject from addiction through to recovery. There is mess, recrimination, suffering, then salvation. But Jane Treays’s moving Mum, Heroin and Me told a more brutal, real story. For a year Treays followed Hannah, a 20-year-old heroin addict, and her mother Kate, who was desperate for her daughter to kick the habit and pick up the remnants of her life. But over and over again every possible chance was squandered and lost.

The truth, as Treays captured it, was gritty and grimy, with precious little hope of salvation. There were no sexy, exploitative shots of the drug abuse itself. That took place in stolen moments: needles were stabbed in legs, Hannah’s arms already so battered that they couldn’t physically take the needles. We followed her from flat to flat. We saw her sitting in the park with her boyfriend, Ricky, wondering what she could do that day: well, she said, she would need only one hit to get to sleep.

Kate, an interior designer, is capable and strong, though last year the intolerable pressure and stress of the situation led her to have a nervous breakdown. We saw the bedroom, now wreathed in sunlight, where Kate told us that she had once tried to detox her daughter and Ricky. The walls were spattered with blood, she said. The horror of the situation was thrown into sharp relief by Kate’s calm, loving, well-spoken words.

Both mother and daughter lived in Brighton, but — having tried everything to help her daughter — Kate now realises that there is genuinely only so much she can do and so she frets about Hannah, worries about her constantly, but has realised that she mustn’t fully immerse herself in Hannah’s drama or she will fatally undermine her own life and that of her family. Her husband and daughter, both loving and supportive of Hannah, did not appear in the documentary.

Treays is absolutely brilliant at capturing the everyday small stories that emblemise the larger. She is a natural burrower for detail, a nosy parker. We followed Hannah from hostel to bedsit, her mum dragging a vacuum cleaner and cleaning products and new pillowcases and an undersheet for a new mattress. This was addiction with a firmly middle class context, so you may have concluded that Hannah wasn’t totally bereft. But soon the new flat’s shiny surfaces were a riot of needles and mess. Hannah was on a shoplifting and assault charge.

One expert said that Hannah could be spurred to ultimate recovery either by losing everything (by being locked up; her family) or she might yet draw on the glints of self-determination that were momentarily evident and then just as suddenly obscured by the fog of addiction and its hideous grip. On Hannah’s 21st birthday Kate wanted to have a lovely day: she had booked Hannah a massage and a hair appointment and bought some new clothes: nice things, she said, but — with the hardness of experience — added, deliberately things that her daughter couldn’t subsequently sell for more drugs.

But on the way to the hairdresser Hannah wanted to score some smack, so Kate had to drive here and there, get money out of a cash machine, watch her daughter get the drugs, then disappear somewhere to take it, then return. “I’d forgotten how frustrating it is, and how much of my life I’ve been wasting,” Kate said as all this to-ing and fro-ing unfolded.

As a mother, you sensed (and saw) she would have done anything for Hannah; and that included having to be pragmatic and know that despite all the attempts at getting the right help and being there, nothing could save Hannah except Hannah. Kate knew she had to protect herself and her family, so the lifeline she offered was constant but qualified. It is an insidious balancing act and your heart (by the end in your mouth) went out to her.

“The reality of this is that it will go on for a long time,” Kate said, just as Treays’s narration informed us that Hannah had been arrested for shoplifting again — so no easy, uplifting final reel. Instead, this an uncompromising and unhysterical analysis of addiction and its terrible consequences — and possibly one of the finest documentaries of the year.

Kylie and Dannii Minogue furnished the inconsistent Beautiful People (BBC Two) with a duet of The Winner Takes It All. Camp overload or cats screaming out in the night? Let the debate begin but please say a video of this exists, or please let them perform it on The X Factor.

The Restaurant (BBC Two)

Meanwhile, The Restaurant edged towards the final with the three remaining couples having to cook for Raymond Blanc’s VIP guests. The candidates struggled to impress Blanc and his inspectors, whether it was butter knives at the wrong angle or turbot suddenly substituted for haddock (diners naturally upset), or not knowing the taste of angelica. How much vegetable risotto did poor Russell throw away in the name of perfection? He looked haunted and lost, even when Blanc put him through to the final.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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