Britain's Youngest Boozers (ITV1)

The Real Vampire Chronicles (C4)

FIRST, the statistics. Britain is the boozing capital of Europe. A third of teenagers are classed as binge drinkers, one in six under-25s is alcohol dependent and 1,000 under-15s are treated for alcohol poisoning each year.

Next, the evidence. Step forward - and try to walk in a straight line - Staci and Ray, 13-year-olds who behave more like sozzled old drunks than teenagers enjoying their youth.

Britain's Youngest Boozers was certainly shocking, although the teenage drinkers weren't the only worry. I was uneasy about the film-makers pointing their cameras at them while they downed bottle after bottle of alcohol until they lapsed into unconsciousness.

It was a sobering sight to see these determined drinkers getting drunk. "I drink to be happy," said Staci. Phil, with three years of hard drinking behind him, had a similar outlook as he celebrated his 16th birthday, intending "to get pissed out of our heads having a good time".

Sharon, Staci's mother, thought a hangover was punishment enough, believing the more she told her daughter not to drink, the more she'd do it. Ray's mother Pauline's policy was to ignore it and hope he grew out of it.

Sherrie Cooke's mother had a different solution. She threw her binge drinking daughter out of the house at 14. We found her at 16 spending her £45 income support on "going into town and getting hammered".

How responsible, I wondered, were the programme-makers filming the teenagers' drunken boasting and antics? Admittedly, they offered several cautionary tales - the 19-year-old who died after drinking a single bottle of spirits and the 32-year-old left with the liver of a 60-year-old and a greater chance of liver cancer after years of teenage heavy drinking.

The makers even tried to help. Phil was booked into a £4,000 a week recovery centre, only to quit on the first morning. His drinking is as bad as ever.

They had better success with Sherrie, who returned clean and sober and with a new outlook after a three-week course at a American wilderness survival school. I can only hope that the programme serves as shock therapy for other teenagers with drinking problems.

The liquid being drunk in The Real Vampire Chronicles was blood. In this macabre real life story, Allan Menzies claimed he bludgeoned his best friend to death on the instructions of the Queen of the Damned. He believed killing him would make him a vampire.

The mystery is whether he truly believed this or whether it was in aid of his insanity plea in court. Whatever the truth, this was a morbidly gripping story related through reconstructions and interviews with leading protagonists, including the victim's mother and killer's father.

Menzies claimed his madness began after seeing a video of the movie Queen Of The Damned, taken from Anne Rice's bestselling Vampire Chronicles novels.

He'd watched it more than 100 times. It wasn't a very good movie. No wonder he became disturbed.