The explosion of TV shows with exposition-heavy titles such as The Boy Whose Skin Ate His Head or World's Deadliest Elvis Impersonators has often been attributed to the need to grab viewers' attention in on-screen TV guides. After all, who has the spare time these days to read all that extravagant in-depth prose in the listings pages of TV Quick?
So imagine the disappointment for viewers too dazed and/or confused to know what to expect from Grow Your Own Drugs (BBC2, Mondays), which aims to put big pharma out of business by showing viewers how to turn lavender into Lemsip and nettles into Nurofen.
Despite the vaguely psychedelic opening credits, which did have a sprinkling of Sergeant Pepper about them, cherub-faced healer James Wong left us in little doubt from the off that his motives were entirely admirable. "I'm not some hippie who believes in flower-power," he spat in the opening moments of this week's show - which was specifically about using garden flowers. "I am, he announced grandly, "an ethno-botanist". Apparently this is a real job and involves recapturing the knowledge, now lost, handed down across the millennia ever since the Druids built Stonehenge as a giant tribute to the throat lozenge.
Though fun, the show is not without problems. Its self-consciously 'edgy' camerawork is surely designed to generate headaches Wong's remedies can subsequently cure, while his contention that "your back garden is a pharmacy" will cut little mustard with aspirant apothecaries living in tower blocks. In fact, at one stage Wong points out that you can get most of the natural ingredients he uses from your local supermarket, which does rather seem to defeat the point.
One heart-rending moment featured the tale of a youngster whose acne disappeared when he ate nothing but apples for three days, but returned as soon as he went back on the crisps, chocolates and generic pot-based noodle products. Who'd have thunk it?
For the record, the author of this column did once experiment with concocting his own herbal remedy while back at university, but certainly didn't inhale.
So imagine the disappointment for viewers too dazed and/or confused to know what to expect from Grow Your Own Drugs (BBC2, Mondays), which aims to put big pharma out of business by showing viewers how to turn lavender into Lemsip and nettles into Nurofen.
Despite the vaguely psychedelic opening credits, which did have a sprinkling of Sergeant Pepper about them, cherub-faced healer James Wong left us in little doubt from the off that his motives were entirely admirable. "I'm not some hippie who believes in flower-power," he spat in the opening moments of this week's show - which was specifically about using garden flowers. "I am, he announced grandly, "an ethno-botanist". Apparently this is a real job and involves recapturing the knowledge, now lost, handed down across the millennia ever since the Druids built Stonehenge as a giant tribute to the throat lozenge.
Though fun, the show is not without problems. Its self-consciously 'edgy' camerawork is surely designed to generate headaches Wong's remedies can subsequently cure, while his contention that "your back garden is a pharmacy" will cut little mustard with aspirant apothecaries living in tower blocks. In fact, at one stage Wong points out that you can get most of the natural ingredients he uses from your local supermarket, which does rather seem to defeat the point.
One heart-rending moment featured the tale of a youngster whose acne disappeared when he ate nothing but apples for three days, but returned as soon as he went back on the crisps, chocolates and generic pot-based noodle products. Who'd have thunk it?
For the record, the author of this column did once experiment with concocting his own herbal remedy while back at university, but certainly didn't inhale.
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