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Four casual users from the UK travel to Colombia to mix coca leaves and battery acid in the rainforest with an eight-year-old ... and learn how to survive the cartels
‘It’s funny,” says Robin Williams as Dr Oliver Sacks in Awakenings, as he is faced with recurring batches of symptoms in patients at his new hospital. “You’d think eventually all these atypical somethings would end up as a typical something.”
I feel much the same about Channel 5. My first impulse when coming to write about its three-part documentary Doing Drugs for Fun?, which takes four British casual users of cocaine behind the scenes of its manufacture and supply, is to describe it as “surprisingly good”. But Channel 5 has been producing good stuff, if not consistently then frequently and for long enough, that the qualifier seems unfair, even to those of us who remember its early years as a purveyor of “erotic dramas” such as The Red Shoe Diaries (with, bizarrely, David Duchovny). Continue reading...