Facing fears

I couldn't help thinking of Corporal Jones's cry of "Don't panic, Mr Mainwaring" as the victims - sorry, phobics - stepped into The Panic Room. This BBC3 series is like a game show crossed with a torture chamber. It's the reality TV version of Room 101 in which people face their greatest fears head-on.

The idea is simple enough: people are exposed to phobias little by little. A drawing of what scares them gives way to a photograph, then a moving image and finally the real thing.

Matters don't start well for Sharon. Even the doctor's name, Felix, could give her a nasty turn as you may recall that Felix the cat is a cartoon moggy. And Sharon's fear is cats.

She says she feels sick and her heart's racing - and that's only talking about cats. When she goes out, she doesn't feel safe until she's in the middle of the road and has a 360 degree view, to see if there's a cat about.The reason for her phobia stems from the fact that as a six-month-old baby a cat sat not on the mat but her face after invading her pram.

Her fellow contestant - sorry, sufferer - is Danni, who can't even bring herself to say what she calls the f-word. That's f for frog. As a child, she once poked frogs in a pond with a stick and now, she believes, they want revenge.

It's making her life a misery. Just imagine how terrified she'd be in a French restaurant serving frogs legs. She can't even read her daughter a bedtime story involving a frog. Not much chance, I'd suggest, of Danni kissing a frog in the hope of it turning into a handsome prince.

These are serious fears that are affecting both women's lives which makes The Panic Room's game show element inappropriate. "Okay, let's start the panic room," says Dr Lucy as Danni steps inside a sealed room to confront her fears.

Once the phobic has been reduced to a quivering wreck, the order goes out, "Stop the panic room".

Admittedly, this cruel-to-be-kind method works. But watching people suffer in the name of entertainment strikes me as creepy, although I'm as happy to do it as the next person when it comes to Big Brother.

Dr Lucy and Dr Felix are doing good, which is more than can be said for The World's Worst Sex Change Surgeon. He practised The John Brown Miniaturization Technique Of Male-To-Female Gender Reassignment Surgery, which is a long-winded way of saying he performed sex changes.

Often, his methods were lacking in finesse, possibly because although a GP, he wasn't a qualified surgeon.

He operated in garages, hotel rooms and trailers.

Many of his patients were left horribly maimed, lured into having surgery by his claims that he could take a penis and turn it into a clitoris. No doubt a good trick if you can do it but he was no Paul Daniels of sex change surgery.

The clue was in his promotional video in which his hands shook (never a good recommendation for a man about to take a scalpel to your manhood) and he mispronounced medical terms.

To America's transsexual community in the 1970s he was a knight in shining armour. To the medical community, he was a risk and he lost his doctor's licence in 1977.

His solution was to commute to work across the border to Mexico where he could slice and dice to his heart's content without the authorities intervening.

He even teamed up with a surgical entrepreneur to tap the market in penis enlargement, being featured in magazines as "the incredible dick doctor".

His downfall was a body in a hotel room. One of the victim's legs had been amputated above the knee. For Brown had got into a different kind of surgery, helping out a man whose fetish was having his leg cut off.

Brown, now 69, is currently in prison serving a sentence for second degree murder. He's living a more comfortable life than many of his patients whose lives were ruined by his backroom surgery.