Television review

The nearest I got to being a Girl Guide was endeavouring to learn the Brownies' oath (hampered by an inability to distinguish a curse from an oath) from a cousin and wondering why on earth she wanted a tea-making badge in the first place. So, spending a week in the company of 63 of them in Picture This: Chiff-Chaff Chums (BBC2) was as familiar an experience as spending a week with a gang of armed robbers, if marginally less appealing. The 63 in question travelled from Grimsby to East Grinstead to pitch tents next to the Bluebell Railway and within the holding pattern for Gatwick Airport. There they set about physical sports and queuing up outside the local phone-box to tell their parents that they only had 10p.

Leading them was Marilyn, 41 and four-square, who first ging- gang-goolied at 10 and claims to have "never missed a year's camping in 31 years". With her was Jane. "I think I've got more barmy since I met Marilyn," she claimed, then pulled a face to illustrate the point. Marilyn and Jane spent the majority of their time either pulling strange faces or capering around with their hands above their heads. That, and cooking with lard. The lard was everywhere: eggs with lard, pancakes with lard. Before everyone sat down to their lard-and-bacon breakfasts, they chinked their cutlery together and sang grace. As they walked around, they sang of Grimsby. Around the campfire they sang "tiddly-widdly-widdly-wo". It made "Four and Twenty Virgins Came Down from Aviemore" sound sophisticated. "I don't think people realise," proclaimed Marilyn, "what I'm like at camp to what I am at home". Well, they do now, old bean, they do now.

True Stories: Hit and Run (C4) was a depressing essay in the uselessness of men. Sorry, but that was the overwhelming impression. It told the awful story of Billal Eter, a second- generation Lebanese Australian, who was mown down by a teenage boy, Linc Beswick, in the aftermath of a nasty racial flare-up between neighbouring lads on an estate in south-west Sydney and left with brain damage. As he lay in a coma, lungs bubbling, his fluffy adolescent moustache lengthening beneath the tube sprouting from his nose, his mother remained by his side.

His father, Abdul, after an initial visit "couldn't bear" to show up at the hospital for six weeks. A friend, trying to inject some optimism over a hookah, told him: "He'll be well soon. God willing he'll get engaged and married." No one got round to telling the mother that he was never going to recover fully. Later, Abdul gazed from a train window and said "I would consider that I've lost him, the dream I once had for him is gone."

His brothers, initially supportive, drifted into fighting and complaints of embarrassment. Beswick vacillated between saying he felt "Sorry for them. Real sorry for them" and claiming he was being threatened. Later, soon before he was sentenced for culpable driving, he said of Billal: "I think about what he's going through and all that. But I know that the bloke's better and that makes it feel a bit better for me."

"Better" consisted of lumbering movement and stilted, slurred speech. Fourteen months after the incident, Billal had severe behavioural problems: he had lost all inhibitions and had developed an eating disorder that caused his weight to balloon. And he was desperately lonely. "I get visitors very rarely. Sometimes my mother drops by. I feel left out. None of my friends visit me, not even my brothers. They used to visit me all the time. Now nobody visits me. Sad old Bill."

The final scene was extremely poignant. Challenged to dance by the family's (female) helper-interpreter, he took to the living-room floor and gyrated like an angel. Suddenly, the sexy, vibrant young man trapped inside this shell of fat was plain to see. Beswick should be tied down and forced to watch the results of his actions. "Better", indeed.