The grim image etched into my memory by a Channel 4 documentary on tonight is of two very young women staggering down a dark street, skirts riding up above their knickers, their legs splayed and buckling beneath them, while the police attempt to help them walk.

Eventually, one girl falls against a lamp post and collapses, so drunk she cannot carry her own weight, as one woman police officer says, helplessly, incredulously: ‘I’m like a mother to them all. Don’t they know the dangers?’

The central focus of this shocking, despairing documentary shot with the emergency services in Blackpool is that the gravest danger facing young girls, right here in Britain, right now in 2012, is not from a stranger or a violent partner, but from themselves.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z2A1xWet7m
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It happens every weekend in seaside towns all over the country. It might be a phase that they are going through but it will improve.

It's every town, every Fri-Sun.

Prompted this video to be made about my locale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8_W3KKfHqc

To be fair to DM, though, I've seen earlier shows in this series and they don't paint Blackpool in a good light (get it, illuminations? Oh well, please yourselves!).

I lived there for 2 years back in the early '90s when I was at college and it was a sh!thole back then - judging by the earlier episodes in this series it's got a whole lot worse! If anything, the Daily Mail write-up is very restrained (can't believe I've just said that, but there you go).

If you catch the earlier episodes of this "999: What's your emergency" on 4OD, I think you'll see what I mean.