Michael Deacon: Blushing reflections on the teenage self In A Very English Education, these boys, now middle-aged, reflected blushingly on their teenage selves, and talked about life since. These days they all seemed fairly normal, which was a shame - they were much more entertaining to watch as teenagers. The old footage was priceless. A boy noisily campaigning for, of all things, the Workers" Revolutionary Party (while the other boys jeered and booed); a boy being scolded for driving to school in a car (and, even worse, bringing a girl with him). Also the speech about acquiring "the right habits for life," given by the quietly unnerving headmaster, his voice like the creep of soft shoes on thick carpet. I hope, 30-odd years from now, Channel 4 does a follow-up programme about Educating Yorkshire. Partly because it would, like A Very English Education, make a fascinating televisual time capsule. And partly because it would give my children something with which to scare their own children into silence. It would be a valuable public service. A somewhat graver documentary was Bedlam (Thursday, Channel 4). This was the first episode of a series about patients at South London and Maudsley psychiatric hospital, originally known as Bethlem or "Bedlam." This week we met patients suffering from various forms of anxiety. One young man spent most of his day on the lavatory, obsessed with the (false) idea that he couldn't control his bowels. A woman was convinced that she kept physically harming people and leaving their bodies in bins. She'd never done anything of the sort. All the patients were perfectly coherent, pleasant and outwardly "normal" - they simply happened to believe things about themselves that were manifestly untrue, and these delusions were ruining their lives and relationships. I want to say I felt nothing but sympathy. But it wouldn't quite be true. I did feel sympathy - the patients" struggles were heartbreaking. But I wonder whether any other viewers also found, somewhere in the recesses of their mind, a tiny, awful part of them that refused to understand, that wanted to shout in frustration, to grab these poor blameless people by the lapels and order them to pull themselves together and stop believing such nonsense. Totally unfair, of course. But hard to block out. Where did it come from, this small, shaming voice? Some lingering atavistic hatred of weakness? I suspect it had more to do with fear. Fear that one day we ourselves might become like these patients, that we too have the potential to suffer this kind of nightmare, that beneath the surface, delusion lurks inside us all. And so - as with a repressed homosexual who loudly denounces gay people - fear transmutes into callousness. It's pure denial. Or, if you like, pure delusion.