Soul searching

Every year 6,000 young people leave care. They're some of the most vulnerable teenagers in the country. They've gone into care because they've been sexually, physically or emotionally abused, so entering the big wide world can be a shock, both for them and us.

The notion of taking them to South Africa to work in a monkey sanctuary might seem mad or misguided, no matter how well-meaning. Indeed, the early scenes in the documentary Into The Big Wide World seem to indicate this is the case. But - and it's amazing to witness - once they start their work looking after the monkeys, their attitude and outlook alters for the better.

Young people who start out as stroppy and unfocused have a change of heart once they're given some responsibility, as they feed, bathe and clean out monkeys being rehabilitated back into the wild.

The parallel between them leaving care and re-entering the world is only too obvious. "Emma's an orphan and so am I," says Emma of her baby monkey namesake.

She put herself into care after her father died and her mother killed herself, ten days after discovering that Emma was being molested by one of her friends.

Emma's comments are particularly moving. "She loved me with all her heart. She had her faults, but she was my mum," she says. "I don't want anybody ever to do that to themselves over me and if that means people don't love me, then that's how it should be."

Nineteen-year-old Joe, too, has a change of heart. Before, he'd been living in a bedsit for a year without any get up and go, just lounging around in his messy room in what he later calls his "dead years". The South African trip gives him a purpose in life and we learn that he's saving up to return to the sanctuary.

The trip doesn't work for everyone. Kerry has anger problems that have landed her in court. She loses it on the long flight and, after a week of disruption, is put back on a plane home.

Her reputation went before her and, as someone remarks in The Captain Bligh Conspiracy: Revealed, reputation, like virginity, is hard to recapture once it's gone.

This drama-doc attempts to restore the good name of the man who provoked the famous mutiny on the Bounty. Or did he? The best moment is when the great, great, great, great grandsons of William Bligh and Fletcher Christian, who led the revolt, came face-to-face to argue whose relative was to blame.

There are claims that Bligh was more "doting nanny than brutal tyrant" towards his crew and that the whole mutiny resulted from him accusing Christian of stealing coconuts.

It seems as if Bligh's reputation was clouded by a biased account of the event written by one of the mutineers and used as the basis for other accounts. It was spin that ruined his good name rather than his actions.

Stephen Fry continues his quest to be the nation's TV health reporter with a two-part series on HIV. He proves a caring and thoughtful investigator, pulling no punches in bringing home both the dreadful effects of the illness and the social responsibility of everyone not to forget it exists.

The facts will surprise some. What was once regarded as a "gay plague" in the 1980s, with homosexual men and intravenous drug users most at risk, has changed. Hetereosexuals have overtaken homosexuals as the most common route of transmission among new cases. He humanises it by talking to those with HIV and those who know lovers or friends who've died from it. And he tries to understand why people still put themselves at risk by failing to take precautions and put themselves in danger with anonymous sex.

Although HIV rarely makes the headlines these days, there are three times as many people with HIV in Britain than there were ten years ago. If nothing else, Fry's programmes remind us that "it's here as much as it ever was," he says.