Dr Alice Roberts: Don't Die Young (BBC2) The Madness Of Modern Families (BBC2)
DR Alice Roberts was standing in front of a large dam which was spewing out thousands of gallons of water. "In seven seconds, this huge dam spills out as much water as I will wee out in a lifetime," she told us.
It was the start of a programme that insisted on taking the pee as she recruited three burly rugby players for an experiment. "Can I analyse your urine?,"
she asked, using a novel chat-up line.
She was more interested in their pee than their bodies. "This is really interesting," she enthused gazing lovingly at three jugs of freshly-peed urine.
I suspect she found all this more interesting than I did. Don't Die Young is the latest addition to the BBC campaign to make us eat more healthily. Such programmes should carry a government health warning: Watching Television Can Improve Your Health.
For starters, Dr Alice related everything we ever wanted to know about kidneys - and not whether to boil, steam or fry them. She wanted us to look after the "amazing machine" that is our body and do our best for our vital organs.
Kidneys, she explained, keep a tight rein on the volume and composition of our blood by filtering out waste and excess water, commonly known as urine.
Some of her advice was, shall we say, obvious. "When you're thirsty, drink something," she advised. But not broccoli juice which she declared "horrible" after drinking a glass.
She allowed a large creepy-crawly to scale her arm (a spider as Jeremy Paxman wasn't available) and discovered, surprise, surprise, that the stress caused her blood pressure to rise.
Watching programmes like this can cause stress, too, once she started on the statistics. One in 80 of us is walking around with diabetes and don't know it.
Some 13,000 people in the UK die each year of kidney-related causes. And most of us have only seen kidneys in the frying pan, which you probably didn't need a doctor to tell you.
If it's not our health they're worrying about, the BBC is gathering together people to grumble and groan. The Madness Of Modern Families might as well be called Grumpy Old Middle-Class Parents.
They tried to get us excited about the horrors of children's parties, described as "the speech day of parenting, your moment to shine, to prove what a fabulous parent you are".
A stressed mother worried that she was being judged like at a dog show. Jelly, party hats and pass the parcels aren't good enough nowadays. Parents have to organise parties with themes in unusual places.
One dad hired a stretch limousine.
Unfortunately his son puked in the back of the vehicle. "I said well done, people usually wait until they're 18 to do that,"
he said.
Other parents hire wild animals for the party. A mother recalled other parents being shocked to find children lying on the floor with a boa constrictor.
The animals, she added, urinated everywhere. Quick, call Dr Alice so she can collect the pee and analyse it.
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