Cherry Healey: Old Before My Time, BBC Three

Vivacious blonde presenter Cherry Healey’s latest three-part series aims to show how a dangerously large proportion of the nation’s youth are abusing themselves with booze, drugs and food “until their young bodies and minds are ready for retirement". Part one – about alcohol - opens, predictably, on the streets of Newcastle where the usual array of working class Geordie pissheads they snag for these programmes are staggering about Bigg Market and slurring that they just don’t care.

“Why dwell on something you may not get?” runs the typical response from a young woman who Healey’s breathalyser suggests shouldn't actually be conscious.  It all ends an hour of blood and misery later with the faintly upbeat outcomes of the “young people who do get help before it’s too late”.

Part grisly medical doc, part investigation into the gruesome reality of addiction, and part long, sad sigh at the state of young people’s attitude to their health, this was a dismal night’s viewing. It was a programme designed to instigate hypochondria in anyone who enjoys a beer or two and it had the stats to back it up. There has been a recent 117 percent rise in liver damage in the under-30s and a 20 percent rise in resultant deaths.

Of course she has a point, but is it all so bleak?

Healey is one of the everywoman presenters favoured by BBC3 (despite a proper aristocratic background) and has previously majored in light docs about dating, marriage, love and self-image. Visibly pregnant and easily likeable, she coaxes life stories from a series of damaged individuals whose worlds have been smashed to pieces by alcohol. Jo from Middlesbrough looks as pregnant as Healey due to massive fluid retention caused by liver damage. She has to have “over 23 litres” syphoned off at hospital in a sequence not for the faint-hearted. Plumber Max has had two attacks of pancreatitis and must “choose between his health and his social life” but is seen guzzling drinks, down-in-one style, with his bawdy mates. Kate’s feet have gone numb and she’s lost custody of both her children due to being rendered incapable by booze after splitting with her partner. Almost unwatchably heart-rending is a mother describing in detail her son’s deterioration and death in bed at 28 from alcohol.

Healey successfully paints a picture of a nation gradually turning toxic. It’s hard, she admits, because “temptation is everywhere”, with 120,000 shops across the country where booze is available, often at every hour of the day and night. Is she implying such sales should stop? Also, the “overall impression” from her Newcastle interviewees is that “no good night is without booze and no-one wants to hear about the dangers”. Of course she has a point, but is it all so bleak?

Back in the Nineties, when rave culture was on the rise, the consumption of alcohol dropped as ecstasy became the drug of choice for young people. Governmental measures were taken to counter this. Raves were legislated against, the nation beaten around the head with images of dying teenage ecstasy casualty Leah Betts, and the drinks companies introduced the first alco-pops, a continuing boom area in youth drinking. Then again, Healey is attending to illegal drugs next week so they're likely a no-no too. Occasionally moving, Old Before My Time also appeared level-headed yet it had an unspoken underlying agenda, hinting that abstinence was the way forward.

It was, in fact, a very old perspective dressed up in new clothes – that young people are enjoying themselves carelessly and too much and will be punished. There was a core of brutal truth that made it both pertinent and shocking, but programmes such as this are really a reflection of a society that looks at itself and doesn't like what it sees. The tone may be starkly factual but, deep down, much older, ingrained moral concerns are often hiding.

Overleaf: watch a trailer for Old Before My Time