Tuesday's best TV: Horizon: The Placebo Experiment - Can My Brain Cure My Body? Succession and Sick Of It

Guinea pigs: Dr Michael Mosley with his volunteers from The Placebo Experiment in Blackpool
BBC/Windfall Films/Maia Krall-Fry
David Sexton4 October 2018

The placebo effect is fascinating.

A placebo (Latin for “I will, please”) is something, such as a fake pill, that seems to offer real medical treatment but actually doesn’t do anything — and “the placebo effect” is the response some patients make in trials to being unwittingly given a placebo.

Believing they got effective treatment they often feel better, with symptoms relieved and pain lessened, even though there has been no actual therapeutic effect.

We’d all secretly like to believe our minds can cure us as effectively as injections and drugs with nasty side-effects. So here comes TV medic and self-experimenter Dr Michael Mosley — past programmes include The Brain: A Secret History, The Truth about Exercise, and Eat, Fast and Live Longer about the 5:2 diet — to make a case for the power of the placebo effect.

Pictured: Dr Michael Mosley attempts to train his own body to respond to a vile tasting green drink
BBC/Windfall Films/Maia Krall-Fry

Mosley and his producer Joe Myerscough recruit 117 volunteers, all suffering from chronic back pain, in Blackpool. In “the Las Vegas of Lancashire”, one in five people suffer from it, it seems — although no other reason for setting the experiment there is revealed. Modest costs, perhaps. Dependable desperation, maybe.

These volunteers are given mock consultations with real doctors and then prescribed important-looking blue-and-white pills and sent off to record video diaries about their experiences. They are all told that although half of them are getting a placebo, the others are getting a powerful new painkiller. Actually, all the pills contain nothing but rice powder.

Enough of the duped volunteers report feeling better to make the show work as intended. Star performer Stacey, 25, gets well enough to take her two girls to the park again, and says she’d be surprised if it was the placebo she had, “because I’ve had eight years of agony and now I’m doing really, really well”. Jim, 71, wheelchair-bound and otherwise seriously ill, abandons his morphine and stands again, getting back on to a canal boat which he loves and had never expected to be able to do again.

Altogether 45 per cent report significant improvement — and, even more impressively, among those who carry on taking the pills even after they have been revealed to be fake, two-thirds still feel better a week later.

Mosley tells us “we have no idea why the placebo effect worked for one group and not the other — there’s no link to age, background or intelligence or any way to predict it”. That’s not quite true. Placebos are known to have more effect on those “open to new experiences”. And on children. But then he has a thesis to talk up. He does admit that “placebos will never be able to fix broken bones or cure cancer, they’re effective mainly in the brain”. But he thinks “that still gives them enormous potential”.

What he doesn’t quite reveal is how his experiment was designed for success by being founded on chronic back pain rather than, say, heart disease. Back pain is one of the problems most directly affected by the release in the brain of endogenous opioids, now known to occur in placebo analgesia. And it is also a pain that is subjectively assessed and overcome or not.

Mosley ends by suggesting that not only has his experiment shown that “the brain is more powerful than we’d ever imagined” — of course it is, some more than others! — but that fake pills might usefully be prescribed on the NHS. There’s no need for that. Luckily, they’re readily available already, from homeopaths and health food shops.

Pick of the day

Sick Of It - Sky One, 10pm and 10.30pm

The further adventures of the well-travelled idiot (and former Ricky Gervais sideman) Karl Pilkington continue in his scripted comedy, created with Richard Yee.

Pilkington has already warned fans of his previous work that Sick Of It is as sad as it is funny. He said his inspirations for the show were Ken Loach films such as Kes and I, Daniel Blake rather than straightforward sitcoms.

The show follows the split personality of Karl, a taxi driver who is troubled by the competing voice of his misanthropic Inner Self.

Inner voice: Karl Pilkington in Sick Of It (Me & You Productions )
Me & You Productions

This week he heads to the country with his Auntie Norma looking for peace and quiet. As Karl decides to break out on his own, he is troubled by the locals reaching out, trying to rope him into activities such as rambling and tandem riding.

In episode four, Karl decides to help tidy up Auntie Norma’s house, but he accidentally donates a photograph of her late husband to a charity shop.

In an effort to find a replacement, they travel to Eastbourne, and Karl discovers a secret from Norma’s past.

Screen time

Succession - Sky Atlantic, 9pm

The concluding episode of Jesse Armstrong’s brilliant family saga arrives at the wedding of Shiv

(Sarah Snook) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) at an English castle, as the battle for control of the media empire rages among the Roy family. Quite apart from the Lear-like tragedy (Brian Cox is magisterial as the ailing magnate Logan Roy), Succession is a brilliant ensemble piece.

It’s hard to pick from Jeremy Strong’s ambitious firstborn, Kendall; Kieran Culkin’s unserious weasel, Roman; or Hiam Abbass’s quietly manipulative Marcia. But the most extraordinary scene is surely the one where the hilariously evil Tom tutors Greg (Nicholas Braun) in being rich, and they feast on tiny songbirds with napkins on their heads.

Succession (2018) (Home Box Office)
Home Box Office 2018

Mud Men - London Live, 8pm

In Westminster, Johnny and Steve wade through untold muck and rubbish. And then, when they’re away from Parliament, the pair liberate items from the river which span the city’s reign as the nation’s centre of power. Remarkably a fragment from an original medieval palace is knocking about, a find which takes the pair to the age of chivalry…

London Go - Tomorrow, London Live, 7pm

From next Wednesday there’ll be more red carpet in London than at a carpet showroom, as the 62nd London Film Festival will host screenings of 225 feature films.

To mark the capital becoming the centre of cinema until late October, London Go will present an LFF special, with host Luke Blackall speaking with London Film Festival artistic director Tricia Tuttle about the selection of films this year. Notable is how the number of female directors has increased this year to 38 per cent and 30 per cent in the number of feature films.

Also joining Blackall is Valene Kane, star of Profile, a film where a journalist investigating Islamic State is drawn into the organisation by a recruiter.

Catch up

Later … With Jools Holland - BBC iPlayer

It’s an eclectic bill on Jools this week. Muse do their thing, John Grant revives Eighties electro (his band wear pig masks) and Jon Cleary delivers a bit of swinging New Orleans funk. But the highlight is 19-year-old Hamzaa, singing a song called You. Hamzaa (full name Malika Hamzaa) comes from Hackney, and her music inhabits the soulful jazzy space left by Amy Winehouse.

A star is born.

The Deuce - Sky On Demand/Now TV

There’s a lot of guilt in this week’s episode of the retro porn industry drama, and blame avoidance.

A 16-year-old girl is killed in a fire at a massage parlour — but whose fault is it? Everyone is to blame in different ways. Meanwhile, Eileen (Maggie Gyllenhaal, pictured) presses on with her Little Red Riding Hood film, and there’s role reversal when it comes to being sexually objectified.

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