Last Night's TV: An appointment hardly worth keeping

In all honesty, had I not been suffering from professional obligation syndrome, I would probably not have watched The Doctor Who Hears Voices. It was billed as a dramatised documentary about Ruth, a paranoid schizophrenic suspended from her job as a junior doctor while tormented by an inner-voice telling her to kill herself, with an actress playing Ruth, but the controversial psychologist who treats her, Rufus May, playing himself. I don't necessarily expect my evening's viewing to be a barrel of laughs, but this sounded grim in the extreme. Still, I grabbed my notebook, gritted my teeth and got on with it. Let it never be said that TV critics don't put themselves through the mill in the line of duty.

I wish I could say that this sense of duty evaporated over the ensuing hour and 20 minutes, but it never really did. The Doctor Who Hears Voices was a worthy project, skilfully done, and Ruth Wilson's performance in the title role was very fine indeed, with the caveat that no actor ever messed up playing a mentally ill character. It wasn't easy viewing, but then it wasn't meant to be. What it was meant to be was compelling, but it wasn't that either.

The problem was in the format. Although all the conversations between Ruth and Rufus May followed exact transcripts, and despite Wilson's excellence, there was an air of unreality throughout. This wasn't helped by May, who was either hamming for the camera, or was himself a very peculiar person indeed, or, in all probability, a little of both. His controversial tactic was to eschew drugs in Ruth's treatment, instead choosing to engage with the voice in her head, which turned out to be that of a boy who had bullied her at secondary school. May thinks that society should embrace mentally ill people, not shun them, an admirable- enough ambition that is slightly clouded by the stark statistic that 50 murders a year are committed by people with mental-health problems; 1,200 a year kill themselves.

May, it turned out, had particular insight into Ruth's predicament, having been diagnosed with acute schizophrenia himself at the age of 18. When a more conventional psychologist explained that a patient who could not be cajoled into taking medication would ultimately have to be forcibly injected, May was able to recall the indignity of being held down by five nurses so a syringe could be jammed into his buttocks. But these experiences didn't make him seem like a safe pair of hands. With his help, Ruth eventually got her job back, but with the voice still in her head, and even May raised the possibility that, perhaps miming his own life a little too enthusiastically, he was in denial of the risks involved.

There was more psychoanalysis in Shrink Rap, in which another troubled woman, Joan Rivers, got the Pamela Stephenson Connolly treatment. "What's she really like when the jokes stop?" asked Connolly at the top of the programme, and of course, as the wife of Billy Connolly as well as a former comedy performer herself, she knows all about the tears of a clown. Nonetheless, I wondered how successful she'd be at drawing out the inner Rivers, and couldn't help thinking of Ken Dodd a few years ago on Radio 4's In the Psychiatrist's Chair. "Ken Dodd, today I'll be attempting to get behind your funny-man's mask, what do you think about that?" said Dr Anthony Clare, soothingly. "I think it's absolutely tattifilarious and totally full of plumptiousness," came the reply.

Rivers was more accommodating; indeed, this was a much more revealing and affecting programme than The Doctor Who Hears Voices, and not simply because of the celebrity factor. Here was a 74-year-old woman who by any standards has suffered emotional trauma – the suicide of her husband followed by estrangement from her only daughter, the death from an Aids-related illness of her beloved psychologist, the meltdown of her career after she had dared to offend America's chat-show king, Johnny Carson – and she talked candidly about each of those episodes. Connolly also asked her what sex was like at 74. "The same as it was at 20," she said. "Disgusting." A short chuckle. "No, it's exactly the same, just that the room is a little darker. You still can get just as hurt, still just as elated."

Given that she goes under the cosmetic surgeon's knife more often than some of us put the bins out (without a hint of a smile on those huge collagen lips, she explained that she was in hospital having liposuction when word arrived that her husband had killed himself), sex with Joan Rivers probably requires the lights on rather than off, on the basis that there can't be anything in the same place as it was when she was 20. But despite all that plastic, she still weeps real tears, and I warmed to her when I saw them.

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