Risking It All (C4); May 33rd (BBC1): NAZ and Mark have a vision: a fast food revolution in which the produce is fresh, the chips are made from real potatoes and the meal is healthy. All very commendable and, as they were a civil engineer and an industrial chemist, you assumed they had plenty of brain cells to rub together.

Risking It All demonstrated that wasn't always the case. They gave up their jobs, sold their homes and put £100,000 each into creating Real Burgers World. A silent partner contributed another £100,000 and they began converting premises in Clapham.

Several things made you worry for their future. They'd neglected to tell the landlord what they intended to use the premises for. When he found out, the idea of a fast food restaurant didn't exactly fit in with his plans to convert the upstairs into luxury flats.

This wouldn't have been quite such a crisis if they hadn't neglected to have signed the lease. They'd already sunk £250,000 into Real Burgers and found themselves with no legal right to be there. Whoops.

The price they paid was a rent increase and agreeing to remove the large sign over the shop front for one that didn't have the word "burger" in big letters. A notice stating RBW was duly erected, making them sound more like a boy band than a fast food outlet.

Things went from bad to worse which, if we're being honest, is the reason we watch such shows. Two months in, they were a grand down, business wasn't meeting targets and their silent partner was making angry noises.

If Risking It All allowed us to observe other people's misfortunes from a distance, May 33rd sucked us into a nasty world of ritual abuse. Guy Hibbert's grim but gripping story didn't let us escape, due in no small part to an uncompromising central performance from Lia Williams as - well, that's the problem. She assumed various personalities to block out what had happened to her

Slowly, too slowly perhaps, as she unburdened herself to a sympathetic osteopath (Soren Byder), we learnt what she'd suffered, and continued to suffer, in rituals involving various "uncles".

A caption at the end stated that dissociative identity disorder is a recognised psychiatric condition, although some experts continue to doubt it. That was the woman's dilemma. People thought her stories of long-term abuse were made up. Another caption, however, assured the viewer that the drama was based on the lives of real women.

Published: 22/04/2004