LOUIS THEROUX: DARK STATES, BBC2, 9pm
WHAT great timing. This new series, which examines the dark side of America, has arrived at precisely the right moment. The three new episodes look at sex trafficking, murder and drugs, and tonight we begin with the latter, in a devastating film called “Heroin Town”.
The town in question is Huntingdon in West Virginia, an area which has been cursed with poverty since its blue-collar mining and factory jobs dried up. Many depressed, bored or desperate people have since turned to drugs, particularly heroin, creating “the most deadly drug epidemic in US history”.
More Americans are now killed by heroin than by guns or car crashes, and it’s growing use has pushed the USA’s life expectancy into decline.
Theroux visits a community in the Appalachian hills, where people who are addicted to the drugs, and those, such as the emergency services, who have to deal with the terrible results — not forgetting the one in 10 babies here who is born with a drug dependency.
ESCAPE, C4, 8pm
I HAD really high hopes for this new series, but they were brought crashing back to Earth by last week’s opening episode. It’s a reality show where a group of engineers were left in the blazing heat of the desert amid the scattered parts of a ruined aeroplane, simulating a crash site.
Would they be able to use their skills to rebuild it and get back to civilisation?
It quickly descended into a cliched reality show, with the participants sulking and bickering. Oh just build the bloody plane, I cried.
This week, we have a new scenario and a new bunch of people. Five engineers are taken to the scene of a simulated landslide where several cars have slipped and crashed into a canyon.
Can they use the ruined parts to construct a working vehicle and escape? And can they do it while acting like educated adults? You can consider this to be Scrapheap Challenge with squabbling dafties instead of deadly serious nerds.
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