The Week on the Telly: How to get a Life by Hannah

Cherry Healey: How to get a life, BBC3

Cherry ‘I’ve had a baby’ Healey, still desperately trying to be the next Dawn Porter, is confused. She had a baby and now she doesn’t know how the world works. In order to reacquaint herself with what the kids are doing these days since she had her baby Cherry is making a documentary series. Tonight she is exploring addiction.

This wouldn’t be a Cherry Healey documentary without an entertaining anecdote about the birth of her daughter Coco. When Cherry was giving birth she was given drugs that made her voice really deep and she felt self conscious about this. If I was in that situation I would probably have been more concerned about the real life living baby trying to claw its way out of my vagina and the horrendous pain and possible prolapse that accompany that, but then I don’t expect I’ll be filmed by a BBC3 documentary crew during labour.

Cherry wants to meet the people behind the headlines, whatever that means, with their Meow Meow and their Twitter and all the other things she missed out on when she was having a baby. She may even take some of their drugs (she probably won’t). The first drug she encounters is laughing gas, which I’m pretty sure isn’t actually addictive at all. Cherry has a quick go, but doesn’t really like the idea of taking a drug that reminds her of labour *eye roll*

Next Cherry is meeting a couple who are looking for a pill to reignite their sex drive. Lucy and Mark used to have sex two or three times a day, but now since they’ve had two children they only manage two or three times a week. Couples across the country hurled cushions and spat at the TV at this heartbreaking revelation. Cherry is more professional however, and patiently heads of to Anne Summers with Lucy to spend £25 on pointless libido pills and cheap looking underwear. Later the couple visit Cherry’s office to reveal that they did in fact have sex, but it wasn’t anything special. The only improvement was that Lucy was more up for foreplay than usual. I feel so relieved for them.

This is all very well, but when is Cherry going to take the real drugs? It’s not as if Lucy and Mark were really addicted to anything (unless sex counts). When are we going to see someone get properly off their face? I want to see Cherry dealing with real addicts under bridges sucking on crack pipes while calling her a whore. Instead Cherry is going to Leeds to meet a man who puts videos of himself taking the legal high salvia on YouTube.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in life it’s never trust a white man in a Rastafarian hat, and certainly don’t take any of his drugs. Luckily I’m not making a BBC3 documentary about addiction where I stated at the beginning that I would try all of the drugs. Luckily Cherry’s new friend projects the image of an experienced drug taker who will be safe and responsible and would never set his trousers on fire while smoking a pipe and rambling incoherently. Oh. After Cherry has put out the fire she decides that she doesn’t want to try the drug, stating that anything that alters her mind is a big no. WHAT A MASSIVE SURPRISE.

Cherry moves onto home territory now and meets Suzy addicted to celebrity diets and slimming pills, but not before she’s revealed her painful university addiction to laxatives. At one point she was on 10 a day, a fact that she managed to somehow keep secret from the people she was sharing a bathroom with. Suzy is just about to start a diet that involves putting drops under her tongue and taking fat burning pills like Snooki from Jersey Shore. This is never going to work, and I feel that perhaps Suzy might be addicted to being neurotic rather than anything else.

After her visit to Suzy, who she manages to cure through the medium of dance and exercise, Cherry is left to reflect on her obsession with her weight. She throws her slimming pills in the bin, but hangs on to her too-small jeans. What would I do, Cherry muses, if my brain was freed from the neuroses of worrying about my weight? The list is endless, but I think that at the very least Cherry should get another commission from this revelation. I don’t think she’s made a documentary about her body issues yet.

Leave a Reply