Eye-opener

THERE can be no drinking game more pointless than doing vodka eyeballers. This is a trend where people pour a shot of neat vodka into their eyes.

I can hear you all asking the obvious question: “Why?”

It’s not only a waste of vodka, but also dangerous, as The Inbetweeners actress Emily Atack reveals in the documentary Ready, Steady... Drink as she investigates drinking games and speed drinking.

We see Stephen, Eddie and James throwing vodka into their eyes. “It makes your eye water a bit, stinging,” admits one of them. Like someone has squirted lemon juice in your eye, adds another.

Emily sums up the feelings of most viewers. “I’m not sure why they’re doing it.” Perhaps it’s more a product of being drunk than getting drunk. Pouring vodka in your eye is more likely to make you blind than drunk.

The actress takes one eyeballer to hospital where a specialist demonstrates the effect of alcohol on a pig’s eyeball. It is not a pretty sight – or “quite an eye-opener”

jests Eddie, who’s clearly not learnt his lesson.

If Emily was expecting a good night out, she was sorely disappointed. Go and have a few drinks with some Newcastle students and monitor their blood alcohol levels during the course of the evening, she’s told.

The students are game for drink or two.

Or three. Or four. Most are “on the way Tonight’sTV By Steve Pratt email: steve.pratt@nne.co.uk to being drunk” before they go out, as it’s cheaper drinking at home, and then top up with drinks deals in pubs and club.

As one female student says of getting ready for a night on the Toon. “Having a glass of vodka lemonade is just as much a standard procedure as straightening your hair.”

Throughout the night, Emily and the four students breathalyse themselves at hourly intervals and keep a record of their blood alcohol levels.

One girl is over the drink-drive limit before she even leaves the flat after only one and a half glasses of wine. The next morning they take breath tests again – and Emily, with the highest reading, is still over the limit.

The results are analysed by Debbie Smith, an alcohol nurse specialist at Sunderland Royal Hospital. Dan’s final reading puts him in danger of “severe impairment of physical and sensory functions, risk of blackout or choking”.

Debbie has no doubt what’s to blame – cheap drink and society today, with people thinking it’s normal to be drunk.

Comedian Russell Kane, who’s backing a national campaign Alcohol: It’s No Joke, says telling teenagers about the dangers of drink is too late as they start when they’re younger. “They’ve already been over the park, got drunk, had a Frenchie with a girl by the dog s**t bin.

At least I had,” he says.

Emily finds nothing to laugh about on board a London Booze Bus, an ambulance service that collects drunks in need of treatment.

It picks up (literally in most cases) about 25 people a night, freeing up other ambulances to deal with proper emergencies.

What she sees is not a pretty sight.

Young people collapsed in an incoherent heap, unable to stand, some with bloody head injuries. Others sit slumped in the bus wearing sick bags to catch the vomit when they throw up.

Emily is left depressed and saddened.

She’s probably in need of a stiff drink but, after what she’s seen, my bet is she’ll think again.

CONSIDER the soil and the rocks.

Where did they come from? How were they formed? The C4 series Birth Of Britain aims to find the answers about how our geologic past is linked to our history, the look and position of our towns and the very landscape itself.

Time Team supremo Tony Robinson travels the land looking for answers – from the volcanic rocks of Scotland, to the thick clay that underlies London and underground into Welsh gold mines.

“I’ve always loved my country – not in a weird jingoistic way, but the towns and villages, the mountains. The chance to see how they were created was such a wonderful opportunity for me,” he says.