A ring-pull can doesn't obviously seem a prop with the potential to make a viewer become tensely expectant when it appears in the corner of a shot. The only two circumstances in which a tin of drink might have this fizz are a Hollywood thriller in which a poisoner is at work in a big city and Inside Clouds (BBC2), a four-part documentary about the work of an addiction clinic in Wiltshire.
At the end of the opening episode, Sarah, an alcoholic we've followed through a six-week course, gives a catch-up interview back in civilian life. She says that things are going okay, but it's a hot summer day and, as she talks, you're aware of the can in her hand. In a thriller, the orchestra would suddenly be sawing at its violins. This is a mature documentary and so there's no clinching close-up of the tense refreshment, but you still inwardly gasp. From the context, you assume the drink is soft, but the doubt that exists is part of the theme of the series.
Sarah is one of three from an in-take of addicts followed in the first programme. Peter, like her, is an alcoholic; Cordelia's demon is heroin. The other patients on the course are protected by electronic masking so that, with discomforting neatness, we have drinker's blurred vision at the edge of any group scenes.
Gabe Solomon's documentary proceeds through short, stinging scenes.
On the train to Wiltshire, Sarah swigs what she swears will be her final beer. One afternoon, during an improving lecture, Peter suddenly gets the "taste in my mouth" which marks a craving. Cordelia, shaking in her bed, manages to say that she is leaving the course and that "my boyfriend is picking me up with a hit". Dave, another patient, is dismissed after a "piss test" shows he is cheating on the treatment. Fluent in the lingo of addiction, Sarah questions this diagnosis: "He wouldn't be that up on gear. Charlie maybe."
It's hard to dislike a programme with such clearly good intentions, and which comes with its educational helplines and websites: television's equivalent of the badge or ribbon worn on a charity day. But, in one crucial sense, Inside Clouds is a landmark moment in observational documentary. The question of whether any experience can still be regarded as private has become central to a decade in which viewers and newspaper readers have followed subjects through cancer, sex abuse, paedophilia, divorce, murder trials, sex-change operations and - in the case of the recent skid-row documentary Brian's Story - a sort of suicide.
Even so, an addiction clinic is the biggest test-case for documentary's right of access because the very process has always been assumed to be dependent on anonymity and privacy. Addiction patients who find a major movie or music star sitting next to them at AA or NA meetings must pledge to keep this information to themselves. And there's evidence that many addicts - and not merely the celebrity ones - are people who need to or want to perform, and use stimulants to aid their display, or to compensate for the adrenaline let-down afterwards.
Because of this, recovery has always involved a withdrawal - medically necessary but also symbolic - from public attention, and the creation of a deliberately non-stimulating environment. Inside Clouds twice points out that no television viewing or reading of books is permitted by the patients. These are distractions that may dangerously arouse the imagination.
And yet these patients who are not allowed to risk watching TV are simultaneously being filmed for it. Part of the psychological exploration of Sarah we see is an exploration of whether she has a need for performance and display. This becomes a worryingly loaded question, because not only are cameras present for the session, but the crew is waiting to interview her for national television about this potential attention-seeking. Denied drugs and alcohol, the patients are allowed the buzz of that top-grade smack for narcissists: television.
This fascinating paradox is never explored because, in the fashionable way, the documentary is, in another sense, anonymous. There's no narration and no audible questioning of the interviewees. This is infuriating because the matter of why the patients can appear on TV but not watch it is only one of several pressing questions.
Why, for example, in a generally secular age, is drink and drug recovery so specifically religious? The patients are shown reciting the 12-step submission to a higher power. Why are all the patients allowed to smoke heavily when all other possibly addictive substances from television to coffee are restricted? Even the point of whether and why Dave, the piss-test resident, did take drugs at Clouds is never put to him or a member of staff.
Before he leaves, Dave makes what seemed to me as a viewer a rather sharp critique of the treatment methods and the way in which every element of behaviour has a sinister interpretation. A sad resident is assumed to be depressed but, argued Dave, "if you're happy, you're not happy, you're acting". Dave's piss-take deserves an answer quite as much as his piss-test, but Inside Clouds is a curious mixture of revelation and reticence. I hope the series helps people, but the point at which a famously anonymous process becomes a four-part series is perhaps one at which documentary television needs to sit down and talk to someone fast.
Inside Clouds - A Drink And Drugs Clinic, Wednesday, 9pm, BBC2
