Adam was given credit for being the first person to use the newspapers to sell their music and image, and although this is becoming such a commonplace that 'X was the first tabloid star' that the show before had been suggesting that Victoria and Albert had been, in effect, the first tabloid stars too, it did give a chance to set the triumphant Dandy Highway cover stories with the more recent, equally prominent coverage of the raging demons. The NME often gets accused of building 'em up to knock 'em down, but clearly nobody does it like the tabloids - they might wait years, but once the boots are on, the boots are in.

The end of the Ants and the decline of the career were skipped through pretty quickly, so as to get to the present. The "reasons" for Adam's mental decline - the loss of fame, the two stalkers, the father turning up and turning out to be a Dirty Old Man (as they still were known before the Internet) - were lined up and run through, and both Marco and Merrick were called on to give examples of the slippery slope that would eventually wind up with him throwing an alternator through a pub window and being sectioned. Interviewed between that sectioning and the later one, Adam isn't so Dandy anymore. Some of the time, he was filmed in what I guess is a TV Researcher's idea of what a mental health ward looks like (he was at pains to dismiss the film-glamour of mental illness - "there's no Jack Nicholson, no sexy middle aged nurse... just the smell of piss and death, and people waiting to die", although this also smacks a little of myth-making of a different kind); for these scenes, he was wearing a too-large bowler hat and his face was round and slightly angelic, as if he was trying out for the part of Fred the Flour Grader. But the sadder scenes were the ones where they shut him in front of a large screen and played him highlights of his career, and excerpts of news footage chronicling the descent into tragedy. For these sequences, he watched with a headscarf (we're guessing he's not taken the loss of his hair as lightly as Brian Molko) through tinted glasses, almost impassively. Even talking about the truly great pop moments he made - Prince Charming, Stand and Deliver - he didn't show any spark, any pride, any emotion linked to them. After explaining about how they'd suffered to knock out the Stand and Deliver video in just one day, his comment seemed to sum up his entire life. Flatly: "it went to number one - that's all that matters." He didn't sound as if he really believed it, more that he hoped that other people would.