Education is fun! Gaining an understanding of how the world around us works is one of the true privileges of being a human being. Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein – these are just some of the people who carved out the framework through which we view our world.
And to this illustrious list we can now add Matthew Parris louchely reclining on red velvet cushions while wafting a spliff around, like Danny in Withnail & I getting ready to expound on the benefits of the Camberwell carrot.
Another drugs TV show is happening, people. Channel 4, obviously. And we all know what that means, don’t we? That’s right: we get to watch some celebrities get off their nut on TV in the name of showing what drugs do to all of our brains – or, at least what they do to celebrities’ brains. And while Channel 4 could save itself a lot of time by going to a Soho private members’ club on a Thursday night, if it’s so interested to find that out, this wouldn’t look quite as scientific, I guess, as shoving people in an MRI machine with a spliff.
This time, it’s the turn of Parris, Jon Snow and Jennie Bond to experience My Drugs Hell. If you’re thinking that a programme featuring a political journalist, a news anchor and the former BBC royal correspondent toking up, all in the name of science, sounds like something Nathan Barley might have dreamed up, surely you should know by now that this is now Nathan’s world; we all just live in it, and watch it on TV.
And if you’re musing that Drugs Live: Cannabis on Trial – to be broadcast next month – sounds familiar, that’s because you’re confusing it (perhaps you’re stoned?) with 2012’s Drugs Live: The Ecstasy Trial, a show the Guardian described as providing a “tentative” amount of scientific discovery. Both of these follow on from the 1955 Panorama special in which the former MP Christopher Mayhew gulped down some mescaline and proceeded to talk about the vividness of colours in the kind of clipped British accent most Britons could only manage now if they were extremely high.
Little known fact: making programmes about drugs completely destroys the cells in television execs’ brains that are responsible for creativity, forcing them to make the same show over and over with almost exactly the same title. It’s a tragedy, really, and someone should make a reality TV programme about this terrible condition.
But these programmes are, by their televisual nature, limited. Artificial, if you will. Thus, they never give the real picture of how drugs destroy your brain. In fact, they universally ignore the mind-melting context around the actual ingestion of narcotics, which I firmly believe contributes to the damage they cause: the awkward phone call to a friend pretending you’re interested in how they are when actually you just want their dealer’s number; the even more awkward phone call to the dealer, when you try to strike the impossible balance between “appealing and friendly” and “total street-cred don”; the interminable wait for the dealer to arrive; the tortuous inner debate about how soon would be too soon to call the dealer to ask where the hell he is; the awkward moment when he finally arrives and money changes hands at last while you pretend to be friends with him (and he clearly could not be less interested in you); the nailbiting minutes afterwards as you wait to see if the drugs he sold you have any narcotic effect at all.
My God, if Jon Snow thinks taking skunk and going into an MRI scanner is scarier than being in war zones, as he wrote on his blog, I’d like to see how he’d deal with the hell that is calling the dealer the next day and asking if maybe next time he could provide actual marijuana instead of some twigs he found outside your flat.
The programme follows Parris, Snow and Bond as they take controlled doses of medicinal cannabis three times over a six-month period at University College London. (And where better to try drugs than at uni?) Without wishing to cast too many aspersions on this scientific investigation, I would suggest that this brief experiment with the brilliant Parris, who is as far from a stoner as I am from Parris’s journalistic genius, is not really going to recreate the true pothead experience.
Similarly, I’m not sure if Snow’s paranoid freakout in the MRI machine after inhaling skunk (“The terror in me kept rising, the panic chasing hard behind”) is as much about skunk as it is about MRI machines. I have had several (non-skunked-up) MRI scans in my life, and I can verify that they are indeed a profoundly unpleasant experience: noisy, claustrophobic, lonely, disorientating. They provoke all the sensations, in fact, that the guinea pigs say skunk made them feel.
Anyway, I’m much less interested in seeing a scan of the brain of Jon “Scarface” Snow (who confesses to have “been passed the odd spliff of cannabis in the distant past perhaps a dozen times”) than I would be in a scan of, say, Snoop Dogg’s. If you really want to scare the kids off drugs, seeing an image of the scrambled egg-like mush that I imagine occupies Snoop’s skull should do the trick.
While critics (ie the Daily Mail) fretted that Drugs Live: The Ecstasy Trial somehow operated as an “advert” for getting E-ed up at the weekend (because, truly, nothing puts the youth more in the mood for a big Friday night than watching Lionel Shriver pop some pills), then I don’t think they’ll need to worry too much with this latest contribution to the genre.
I, for one, am extremely excited to hear Jennie Bond’s thoughts when she’s stoned out of her mind. My God, imagine the Diana conspiracy theories a royal reporter will come up with when she’s on the skunk! But that may well be just me (and Mohamed Al-Fayed). For the masses, it’s hard to think of anything more likely to put da kidz off drugs than a series of po-faced programmes featuring some sixtysomethings sitting round smoking spliffs.
So really Channel 4 should just dispense with any pretence to science here and run these shows as public service contributions, showing the least cool people in Britain taking drugs, and thus turning today’s youth into a generation of Saffys from Absolutely Fabulous. Next month: Paul Daniels gets on the crystal meth.
- This article was amended on 19 February 2015 to remove language that was inconsistent with Guardian editorial guidelines.
