Mayhew: MP off his nuts on class A
The camera closes in on the smiling Labour MP as the full impact of ingesting 400mg of mescaline hydrocholoric takes hold. Has Christopher Mayhew?s acid trip, filmed by Panorama, broken television?s final taboo?
Ultimately the 1955 LSD experiment proved too hot to handle for the BBC, which suppressed the footage for a decade.
But the furore surrounding Drugs Live, a new Channel 4 series which explores the impact that taking class A drugs has on a group of people, suggests that there are genuinely few new boundaries for sensation-seeking broadcasters to bust.
Last week BBC One braced itself for a backlash after screening a dying man?s final moment. Michael Mosley?s Inside The Human Body showed an 84 year-old cancer sufferer called Gerald dying at his home surrounded by his family.
The episode, which generated acres of pre-publicity, was seen by four million viewers on Thursday night and received widespread praise for a sensitive treatment of the subject.
But the BBC had already lost out in the race to show real death to Sky Real Lives which filmed 59 year-old Craig Ewert, a motor neurone sufferer, who allowed his assisted suicide to be filmed in 2008.
Connoisseurs of the expired will have previously enjoyed the live human autopsies carried out for Channel 4 by Dr Gunther von Hagens in Channel 4.
At the other end of the life spectrum, the BBC filmed a therapist and her partner having sex for a documentary about Viagra in 1998, although the 53 year-old woman ?kept her nightwear on throughout.?
Mosley: Going Inside the Human Body
There are few areas of human indignity that a camera won?t be thrust in front of. Want to see an emotional breakdown as it happens? Vanessa Feltz?s meltdown became a ?highlight? of the 2001 Celebrity Big Brother series.
Lord Reith never imagined that the World?s Biggest Penis and Designer Vaginas (thank you, Channel 4) would be accepted nightly viewing. So what ?off-limits? subjects are yet to be turned into mainstream viewing? Bestiality?necrophilia?
Roger Graef, the pioneering documentary maker, said: ?Those areas of human experience are covered in television fiction.There are a huge number of people who want to become forensic psychologists because of Silent Witness. Good fiction can be a form of education too.?
Graef, whose 1982 film An Allegation of Rape changed the way police handle such cases, believes that no subject should be off limits from a documentary maker able to handle an issue sensitively. ?Everyone knows people who take drugs and everyone is going to die,? he said. ?It is the elephant in the room, These films show television coming of age in the 21st century.?
Paul Watson?s ITV1 film, Malcolm and Barbara: Love?s Farewell, prompted controversy by claiming to show the moment of an Alzheimer?s sufferers death. ?It was the most sensible film I?ve seen on Alzheimer?s,? said Mr Graef. ?There?s a natural unwillingness to look at death in the face and have a proper discussion.?
Dame Joan Bakewell, who watched a couple have sex for a pornographic film in her BBC series Taboo, said: ?My rule of thumb is sex is life-enhancing but violence is dangerous.?
Should the BBC be as keen to show the reality of death during news reports from war zones as it was in the controlled environment of a dying cancer sufferer? Dame Joan said: ?I don?t think BBC News should show beheadings and women being stoned to death because violence is still a taboo.?
So what would the final television taboo be? Bakewell, the Government?s former voice for older people, said: ?There could be more geriatric sex on television. It?s a question of whether geriatrics want to see themselves in bed together. But it could cheer a lot of old people up.?
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