TV review: Victorian Pharmacy | Storyville: The Baby and the Buddha

FROM the makers of Victorian Farm comes Victorian Pharmacy, another historical documentary series in which three experts pretend to live and work in them olden days.

The previous series was a chore, featuring far too much masonry, milking and kneading for my blood. But this is a mild improvement if only for the reason that it's slightly gorier. As someone interested in the more gruesome aspects of Victoriana it proved surprisingly diverting.

Setting up a pharmacy in a mock Victorian town, the team were keen to point out that none of the era's more dangerous ingredients would be used in their medicines. So no opium, arsenic or chloroform, sadly. Such a needless compromise. So what if your customers start keeling over on the cobbles? At least we'd get a more realistic idea of medicinal practices in the 19th century, when all you needed to qualify as a pharmacist was a reasonably authoritative moustache. I thought that was the point of the exercise.

Still, at least we saw some leeches and the mixing of a medicine made from earthworms, although in typically timid style they used dried worms rather than throw live ones into boiling oil, lest anyone at home popped a monocle in disgust.

They also showed off the aptly named scarifier - basically a small metal box with moving blades used to draw blood - and revealed that those familiar jars of coloured liquid in pharmacy windows were originally supposed to represent bodily fluids such as bile, blood and phlegm. You've got to hand it to those Victorians, they knew how to make the world seem a more foul and terrifying place.

By far the most startling revelation was the everlasting pill, so called because you swallowed it, passed it, cleaned it up and stored it away for further use by you or your family. It could even be passed through generations, literally if need be. I like to think that someone as we speak is reaching for a pill once excreted by their great grandmother. Hey, an heirloom's an heirloom.

Tibetan monks tend not to be defined by a desire to appear on television, so it's remarkable that director Nati Baratz gained sustained access in Storyville: The Baby and the Buddha, an uneven documentary in which a young monk went in search of his reincarnated Master.

A tenet of Buddhism is that an enlightened being can choose their next life form. So when Tenzin Zopa's Master, to whom he'd been devoted since childhood, died in his eighties, tenuous signs led Zopa on a journey to find his new form and return him to their Monastery.

Despite an intriguing premise, and the insight it afforded into Buddhist rituals, the first half was painfully slow, as Zopa wandered the countryside asking bemused toddlers if they recognised his Master's rosary beads.

But it became more troubling once the hallowed child was chosen. Essentially stolen from his rural family - given up more out of deference than desire on their part - he was hurled into a tumult of well-meaning yet bewildering idolatry, sanctioned by the Dalai Lama himself. Baratz's eye remained non-judgmental, leaving me to squirm at images of a family torn apart at the behest of blind faith.