On TV

Compulsion: Love Will Tear Us Apart (BBC2)

ANOTHER night on TV, another set of problems. On the BBC, if the hot weather doesn't kill you then a gambling, drug, alcohol or sex addiction will ruin your life.

Heatwave was one of those dramatised documentaries favoured by the BBC at the moment. This wasn't like previous shows like Volcano, which took the trouble to provide a factual background for the natural disaster. Here, the year was 2006 and Britain was baking in two weeks of exceptionally high temperatures causing transport chaos, massive countryside fires and a public health crisis in which thousands died.

Half a dozen dramatised stories illustrated events, including a family on holiday in Blackpool to a trainee hospital doctor. It would have been more convincing if I hadn't recognised some of the actors pretending to be ordinary people. I recalled the father playing Toad of Toad Hall and last saw the paramedic as George Orwell on stage.

Heatwave failed to provide an explanation for such a hot spell, apart from a passing reference blaming global warming. Why not just make a disaster movie and be done with it? This had many of the necessary ingredients, including a pregnant woman trapped in a tube train and dozing children slowly baking in a locked car.

Compulsion offered real suffering in the first of a series about addictive behaviour, following last month's film about a compulsive gambler. Love Will Tear Us Apart doubled the anguish by concentrating on a couple, Matthew and Camilla, attempting to overcome their addictions. His are drugs, gambling and alcohol. Hers are drugs, cleaning, infidelity and uncontrollable spending.

We joined them after they'd moved to Kent, to live in a community based around a church but open to all.

Camilla was clean of drugs and three months pregnant with their third child. Matthew was struggling, understandably perhaps as he'd first hit the slippery slope at 15 when drugs and alcohol became "a companion to me and something I could be really good at". He felt his gambling was the most dangerous and intense addiction. "I've done the children's school fees in one hour on the Internet," he confessed.

Dr Peter Holmes, co-founder of Christ Church, Deal, spoke of them carrying deep pain and unresolved issues, using addictive behaviour to anaesthetise the pain. Most people would have seen this, surely the point was finding a means to overcome this.

While both realised that their children were suffering because of their parents' addictions, only Camilla seemed willing and able to do something about it.

She continued to clean furiously, but as she said, "At least mummy is not behind a bathroom door taking heroin."

Matthew went missing as soon as his grant cheque came through. Film-maker Paddy Wivell went to London to find him. "I'm starving hungry, did Camilla give you any money?" were Matthew's first words.

He didn't ask "How are the children?" or even say "I'm sorry". It was the children and the new baby for whom you feared the most. What hope do they have of a bright future?

Just Desserts!, Darlington Civic Theatre

BEWIGGED, bothered and bewildered, Britt Ekland's character Juliette - a wife about to learn her husband is a love rat - appears quite late in the proceedings. Even so, the somewhat dowdily-dressed former Swedish sex bomb throws herself into the fray of mistaken identity, comic timing and drunken impropriety with enthusiasm. Most will have gone home happy just to say they've seen an international celebrity frolicking somewhat carefully on stage.

The debut tour of this Marc Camoletti Paris-set French farce, transformed into English by Tudor Gates, has quite a complex plot with Giles Watling as jealous husband Bernard proving a master of talking in riddles. He's aided beautifully by Sabina Franklyn, as his cheating wife Jacqueline, and Anita Graham, as the world's grumpiest maid, Marie-Louise.

David Callister is given another opportunity to shine as Jacqueline's lover Robert, who is faced with the ultimatum of death or handing his wife over for the night to Bernard. Robert craftily responds by hiring hooker Barbara (a short-skirted excursion for Malandra Burrows) to pose as wife Juliette.

This is the fine art of the unexpected meeting the unlikely, and Ekland's Juliette duly turns up at Bernard and Jacqueline's apartment at the wrong moment. Cue scenes of panic and confusion. There are still plenty of highly watchable sight gags even if this steamy-sounding scenario never gets much further than Bernard having his coat dishevelled. As pudding races go, this is almost a complete farce.

Viv Hardwick

Runs until Saturday. Box Office: (01325) 486 555

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