Horizon: Sports Doping review – like a CBBC version of a grown-up documentary

Xand van Tulleken is a handsome man – chiselled face, designer beard, eyebrows that would give Cara a run for her money. He is a doctor and a TV personality with a rhyming name; he has a USP (his identical twin brother, also a TV personality) and oodles of charm. Lucky fella! But all this doesn’t ensure great, grown-up television.

Horizon: Sports Doping – Winning at Any Cost? (BBC2) is more of a romp than an exposé. It’s such a rich subject, yet it suffers from that classic British documentary failing: lack of self-belief. You can imagine the producers’ conversation: “Maybe if we tart it up with jokes and stunts, people will watch.”

Van Tulleken visits disgraced American sprinter Tim Montgomery, who broke the 100m world record in 2002 with a time of 9.78 seconds, before it was voided because he had been using performance-enhancing drugs. Which ones? Everything going, says Montgomery, who now coaches children to do it the right way. It’s a salutary tale – Montgomery went to jail for money laundering and drug dealing. But Van Tulleken doesn’t bother telling it. He’s too busy showing that, even after a morning’s coaching from Montgomery, he still can’t beat him in a race. “It soon becomes apparent that there’s more to running fast than meets the eye,” he muses.

Van Tulleken is best known for presenting – alongside his brother, Chris – Operation Ouch!, a Bafta-winning children’s medical show that specialises in features such as “Why do we fart?” and “What happens when you need a wee?”

At times, it feels as if this Horizon has been made for CBBC. Sure, it’s entertaining and informative (we learn that more and more regular gym-goers use steroids to boost their six-pack; that traditional drug dealers are now flogging steroids; what drugs can do to the brain, kidneys, heart and sperm count; that undetectable genetic doping is the future). In the end, though, this investigation is a superficial sprint through every doping issue – dumbed down, sexed up, a tad dishonest and, at times, plain daft.

No Xand van Tulleken show is complete without an appearance from his twin. So, Xand calls on Chris for a testing of legal drugs. One takes caffeine, the other a placebo; they race bikes and, hey-ho, it emerges that the caffeine-taker wins. Now, I’m no Isaac Newton, but this doesn’t strike me as proper science. Of course, were Xand to do the sensible thing and test himself with a placebo and the real deal, you would lose the Twins R Us fun element.

Van Tulleken reveals how Mike Tyson foiled drug testers by using somebody else’s clean urine and complex prosthetics – which leads us to a shady hotel room, a plastic penis and Van Tulleken having a right rum time of it. “Those of you with a sensitive disposition should probably look away now … so this is ... Wow! WOW! I was not expecting this to be that good ... this really is a convincing fake penis ... maybe a little small.” It was a throwback to OTT, Chris Tarrant’s adult version of the anarchic kids’ show Tiswas. OTT lasted for one series.

After interviewing a body builder who suffered kidney failure, an appalled Van Tulleken confesses that he has been contemplating taking steroids to get rid of his dad bod. “I can’t believe I’m even wrestling with this ... but this is not the way. These are dangerous drugs.” Oh, come off it, Xand – you’re not wrestling with taking steroids, you’re making a TV show.

***

A new series of Imagine (BBC1) can mean only one thing: yet more shots of Alan Yentob nodding. At least he was actually there this time. Last night’s slot was dedicated to the wonderfully bonkers British artist Cornelia Parker, whose work ranges from installing a sleeping Tilda Swinton in a glass box for the public to stare at, and squashing brass instruments with a steam roller and suspending them in the air, to painstakingly reconstituting fragments from an American church razed by arson to create something ghoulishly ethereal.

Parker destroys to create, transforming acts of violence into artworks of shimmering or charcoaled beauty. Yentob’s analysis is eloquent and perceptive. My beef is with his omnipresence. For every shot of Parker, there’s one of him. Has there ever been a middle-aged man so convinced of his own gorgeousness? When he tells us how Parker found love in Texas and married the artist Jeff McMillan, the image in front of us is of Yentob taking a selfie with Parker. At the end, we are left not with Parker’s work, but with another Yentobian indulgence – footage of the two of them walking along Brooklyn bridge, Yentob, centre stage, in his green, foam Liberty crown. In the 1970s, Yentob made a classic documentary about David Bowie, Cracked Actor. He didn’t appear in it once. Perhaps it’s time he revisited that film and learned how to butt out of his own shows.