Television is a pretty decent invention

Last night's TV reviewed: Waking the Dead; Am I Normal?; The Complainers; Stephen Fry and the Machine That Made Us

Even in normal circumstances, Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve) from BBC1’s Waking the Dead must be one of the most intense detectives on television. Last night, though, he definitely had plenty to be intense about. They're up against the Irish National Liberation Army, the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, and Basque separatists Eta. I wouldn't be surprised if, in part two tonight, Boyd finds out that Farc, the Tamil Tigers and al-Qaida are involved as well. Still, he's got his see-through wall to write on, and his fearsome temper to call upon when things get tough. He should be all right. And Trevor Eve has a new haircut which makes him look slightly less like Noel Edmonds and even less like Hughie Green. That has to be a good thing.

The latest two-parter began with him bidding farewell to the American girlfriend who’d clearly captured his heart prior to flying back home. “I wish I’d never met you,” said Boyd in his trademark mutter (which alternates neatly with his trademark shout). That was never going to improve the mood of an already erasable bugger (trust me, I know, from experience). Not long afterwards, he heard that his teenage son had just gone from homelessness to a mental hospital via an unfortunate encounter with the former ETA agent Lore Carson (Beatriz Batarda) and an electric train line. And as if that wasn’t enough, it also seems as if Boyd might also have Mother Issues, either about his own mum, his son’s or both. Interrogating a young mugger, he threw in the not-strictly-relevant question, “When did you last talk to your mother?” – adding darkly that “If you have a mother who gives a damn, then you’re one lucky boy.”

As ever in Waking the Dead, the upshot is a strange mixture of an intriguing, even classy thriller and dollops of the purest corn. No matter how complicated the plot became, for example, almost every aspect of it managed to remind Boyd of his own troubles. At one stage, Lore was required to prove her French origins by uttering a hearty “Zut alors!” And of course, there’s always the classic scientific dialogue from Boyd’s omniscient colleague Dr Eve Lockhart (Tara Fitzgerald). Faced with a 15-year-old charred corpse, most forensic experts might be content merely to “run single nuclear-type polymorphisms and carry out some stable- isotope profiling on the bone marrow”. Eve, however, also opted for a “microscopy to compare fibres and a microspectrophotometry and chromatography test to compare dyes”. It's all mad, loop-the-loop, bonkers conkers. But, somehow, Waking the Dead manages to be good fun. Actually, not just somehow; Trevor Eve's the one to thank. His understated irritability is totally convincing and manages to ground the whole thing in some kind of reality. Just. There are few television sleuths more interesting than Det Supt Peter Boyd.

Now, if you judge an illness by its cures, addiction emerged from the first edition of Dr Tanya Byron's new series Am I Normal? (BBC Two) somewhat lacking in credibility. Byron had the undeniably good idea of taking apart all the received wisdom on the subject of addiction and subjecting it to careful examination. The trouble for the programme was that, rather anti-climactically, all the received wisdom turned out to be true. Addiction, Byron duly concluded, is caused by a combination of biological, psychological and social factors. The line between compulsive (or even habitual) behaviour and true addiction is often blurred. People can become addicted to activities as well as to chemicals.

Here was Nikki in Harley Street looking for help with her chocolate habit from Kevin Laye, a thought field therapist who modestly described himself as not a healer but a “technician”. Laye told her to think of herself as a computer and him as the IT guy come to “delete” her virus. He began tapping her “energy points” beneath her neck, on her cheek, and forehead. And he went on tapping, for 40 minutes, and still Nikki liked her Yorkie bars. “There could be toxins,” Laye said, in the way the IT guys say “it could be your hard drive”. The funny thing was, the next day Nikki did give up on chocolate and she kept away from the demon confectionery for all of three months. Then she started guzzling again.

Ben was a smoker. Sorry, I should say, is a smoker, despite a heavy session of EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing and has been approved by NICE (the government body that denies drugs to breast cancer sufferers). This required Ben to look at a pen as it was waved across his face by a man with a very deep voice and then track a blob of light across a screen that was showing images of smoking-related disease. “Congratulations. Enjoy your life as a smoker,” said the man in his deep voice. But when Byron's team followed up this miracle of brainwashing, it discovered that Ben was once again puffing away.

And then there was Teresa, a lifelong heroin addict who had turned to prostitution to finance it. Her cure was Equine Assisted Therapy, which was why Byron was talking to her in a paddock where five horses - one for every child of hers who had been taken into care - were showing her some “unconditional love”. “I never thought I would stand in a field of horses talking to a woman who had taken drugs from the age of 9 to the age of 40, wanting to cry my eyes out,” Byron said. But then who would? Yet Byron was also careful to say that, although Teresa had been off drugs for a year, the treatment was still being evaluated.

Byron's strength, as readers who solicit her advice know, is that she is fair and open-minded. There were points in the programme when I wished she were a bit less so and took a point of view on this addiction business, which now recruits not only sex addicts but computer game fans. The problem was that Dr Jeffrey A.Schaler, the author of Addiction is a Choice, a book that holds that addicts are simply flawed people who make poor choices, was not particularly persuasive. If you want to stop, stop he said. After all, people do. He reminded me of Gore Vidal responding to an interviewer who asked how he had cured his anorexia: “I ate something.” He was sort of missing the point.

Byron showed us brain scans that revealed that for addicts some stimulants not only released dopamine in one part of their brain but closed down the impulse control response elsewhere. But most of us have lived long enough to know that some people have addictive personalities and for the worst of them, their best bet is to become addicted to Alcoholics Anonymous or one of its sisters. Schaler's pull-yourself-together response is attractive because it places individual responsibility at its core but it is a bit like what Bill Bryson was saying in The Times about taking away litter bins from beauty spots. The theory is that people will take ownership of their mess and take it home. The practice is, they don't.

Unfortunately, every time Schaler said “It’s as simple as that”, you knew it wasn’t really. And so, needless to say, did Byron – who, whatever she claimed, never seemed entirely in the business here of rethinking everything she felt she knew. The result still worked quite well as a means of giving some familiar debates a thorough airing. Yet, coincidentally enough, her own supposed scepticism about mainstream ideas ended up looking like a choice she’d made (in this case for the purposes of television) rather than something hard-wired into her brain.

In The Complainers (Ch.5) Dom Joly sent a couple of stooges into a restaurant, their brief to behave with increasing obnoxiousness while a hidden camera filmed the response of the people on the neighbouring table. In two cases, the folk on the next table simply got up and moved elsewhere, issuing not a word of complaint despite a litany of offences to complain about. In the third instance, a man finally voiced his annoyance, but it had taken a smashed glass, full of wine that splattered his trouser leg, to propel him to the end of his tether. Joly's point was that the British do not readily complain, perhaps because we are still innately good-mannered. He thinks we should rail against petty modern irritations, and those who would curb our liberties. To this end, one of his colleagues started fixing a wheel clamp to an illegally-parked van while its driver, an official wheel-clamper, was clamping an illegally-parked car. Unfortunately, the clamper's response to being clamped was bemusement rather than righteous anger, which slightly diminished the effect.

There was much in this programme that was socially relevant. Joly addressed the Orwellian nightmare of five million CCTV cameras keeping tabs on us, for example. But he seemed a little over-protective of his reputation as a prankster. In sleepy Dawlish in Devon, where the CCTV cameras are disguised as lampposts, he asked a man who appeared to be partially blind whether he had seen any street crime. This encounter was shown over and over, rather as if the editing had been thrown to a couple of sniggering third-formers, vastly entertained by the spectacle of an elderly man wearing protective dark glasses being asked whether he had, wait for it, seen something. It was a curious, jarring misjudgement.

Still, for all its occasional ham-fistedness, and some confusion over its identity as it lurched between comment and comedy, The Complainers might just be worth following. A preview of next week's programme showed a man with a loud-hailer asking a loud-hailing, street-corner evangelist why he had to be so loud. "Jesus didn't have a loud-hailer," he bellowed. Quite so.

At any rate, a nation that can boast Stephen Fry as one of its own can never be entirely dismissed as beyond the pale, gentility-wise. In Stephen Fry and the Machine That Made Us, he was at his most engaging, presenting with intelligent wit the story of the man who invented the printing press almost 600 years ago – Johannes Gutenberg from Mainz on the banks of the Rhine , "the silicon valley of medieval Europe".

Cursed with a beard that looked like a fish stuck to his face, treacherous investors, and terrible business sense, Johannes's addiction was to perfection, which is why, when Fry opened up his vellum Bible, it did not fall apart in his hands and its pages of justified type looked as beautiful as ever. It gave him gooseflesh just thinking about it said Fry, clever cleverly.

This was a fine documentary, yet as notable for what it did not contain as for what it did. There was, television gods be praised, no dramatic reconstruction of Gutenberg and other Germans with medieval beards discussing font sizes, just Fry talking to other intelligent people and assembling a vivid picture of Gutenberg's life and work, helped by a talented carpenter, Alan May, who knocked up a convincing copy of Gutenberg's original press.

Fry thinks that the printing press dwarfs all other inventions. He could imagine a world without cars, telephones or computers, he said, but not without the printed word. I feel duty-bound, perhaps even vellum-bound, to agree. But here was a reminder that television, too, sometimes counts as a pretty decent invention.