The Man With No Past: Extraordinary People (five): Tales From The Jungle (BBC4)

ONE day in December 2005, David Fitzpatrick was found outside a London hospital. He didn't know why he was there or even who he was.

This "unknown male" became listed as a missing person. Here was "a fit young man who had no memory".

The Man With No Past was a mystery story that wasn't so much a whodunit as a who-am-I? The thought that his mind had been wiped for no apparent reason or without warning, couldn't help but make you wonder what you'd do if it happened to you.

David had suffered a psychogenic fugue, a fancy name to disguise the horrible situation in which he, as well as the family and friends he didn't remember, found themselves.

His identity was discovered after he was given maps of the area to look at in the hope something rang a bell.

Eventually, he picked out a road where the father of his best friend lived.

It wasn't just personal memories he'd lost but world-shattering ones such as the death of Diana and 9/11.

His journey to rediscover his memory was an intriguing one even if, by the end, he wasn't much the wiser, just more certain that one day everything would come back.

Visiting the British Museum to learn about our history was educational but couldn't be expected to jog his memory about the daughter he didn't know he had.

He could still play football but not recall previous games or his awards for sporting achievements. He returned to his old school, looked at photographs, and friends recollected time spent together.

His daughter, he discovered, was the result of a relationship as a teenager.

He'd broken up with the girl, and began drinking.

As his life spiralled out of control, his mind shut down. The fugue was caused by emotional not physical injuries.

We left David ready to start again after confronting his past. But at the back of his mind is the worry that the fugue could re-occur, his recovered memories wiped out and put him back to square one.

Anthropologists are an odd bunch. The second in the Tales From The Jungle series provided another story of a flawed genius. Bronislaw Malinowski was the founder of social anthropology - he "civilised the savage and savaged the civilised". Before him, anthropologists relied on reports from amateurs in the field. He took a different approach, living among the tribes in Papua New Guinea and observing them first hand. It led him to the radical conclusion that these savages were just like us.

His private life was not exactly squeaky clean. He took regular injections of arsenic for his nervous disposition, and had a prolific love life.

What really tarnished his reputation was the publication of his private diaries which showed him up as arrogant, a liar and a racist.

They endorsed his theory that everyone everywhere, both the civilised and the savage, are driven by the same passions - hunger, fear, vanity and sex. And Malinowski was no different to anyone else.