Inside Harley Street, BBC2 - review: Vanessa Engle saves real characters till last

The three-part documentary has provided fascinating insight into private healthcare and cosmetic medicine

Inside Harley Street (BBC)

Some of the alternative medicines offered in Inside Harley Street wouldn't have been out of place in ex-Maester's Qyburn grisly laboratory. Whatever you've got, they can cure it, and if you don't have anything wrong with you? They'll cure that too. All for a price, of course.

Vanessa Engle's three-part documentary has already provided fascinating insight into private healthcare and cosmetic medicine, but she'd apparently saved the real characters till last. A neurologist with a mad scientist accent prescribed intravenous vitamin infusions to stressed-out City execs at £280 a pop and a practitioner of the emotional freedom technique asked patients to describe the colour of their pain: "If someone says to me it's red, I know that's about anger and frustration, if it's yellow, I know that's about childhood."

Then there was Maryam Rahbari, a woman moved to tears by love for her own therapeutic leeches. One of Maryam's clients said he was turned on to the benefits of blood-sucking worms by an ex-girlfriend's mother. She lived, appropriately enough, in Transylvania.

Engle was sure to ask all the pertinent-impertinent questions, such as "Are you a hypochondriac?" and "Are you mad?", but there's no denying that these alternative therapies confer some inexplicable benefit on those who seek them out. The proof was in the parade of satisfied customers we saw exiting the nearby homeopathic pharmacy. I wonder if they've got anything for my scepticism?