Powerless over cocaine... Daniel Baldwin. Photograph: AP
Pay attention. Dame Fortune has spun her wheel, and once again it's time to ask the age-old question: right now, at this very second, which is the most screwed-up Baldwin brother?
This month, the answer is Daniel, as the acting dynasty yields up its most enchanting train wreck for rubberneckers since the leaked voicemail message in which brother Alec screamed, "You thoughtless little pig," at his 11-year-old daughter. Come to that, it's the most enchanting train wreck since brother Stephen knocked his blow-and-Playmates habit on the head to focus on his born-again Christian ministry. "I should know this," he mused in frustration when a magazine asked him to list the 10 commandments. "I spank my children for not knowing this." Lovely people.
Anyway, in case you are not au fait with Daniel's work - and trust me, it's way more of a blur to him - he is the Baldwin who starred in Homicide: Life on the Street, and since then has devoted his time to phoning in TV movie appearances and running naked through hotel lobbies calling for cocaine. You'd still rather have a pint with him than Alec.
But now we must know him as the man who brought TV cameras into rehab, making a series of 19 video diaries for an ABC network show that charts his progress during a three-month stay at the Renaissance clinic in Malibu. (Lost in Showbiz hasn't studied the prospectus for Renaissance, but it sounds a little redbrick compared to Promises.)
"I've been very thorough in my recovery," he explains in one of these important episodes, "and identified where I am powerless. I am truly powerless over cocaine ... Fact of the matter is, I will never recover. I will just always be in recovery and stay sober, so I pray." And on it goes.
Lost in Showbiz is no closer to uncovering the point of the exercise, so let's cast it as one of those "I'm here so you don't have to be" celebrity homilies, designed to persuade anyone else who might suddenly discover themselves to be a Baldwin brother that there are other, as yet unspecified alternatives to getting permanently high.
