Scared of balloons? Check in to Channel 4’s Fear Clinic ...Middle East

From I’m a Celebrity… to SAS: Who Dares Wins, we seemingly love watching other people being terrified. So the makers of Channel 4’s new series The Fear Clinic: Face Your Phobia – which sees people suffering from crippling phobias come face to face with their greatest fears – are clearly on to something. Plus, there is the spectacle of people being cured – the staple of every hospital docuseries.

The Fear Clinic sounds ominously Orwellian. But the reality is a smart but homely Amsterdam office space predominantly staffed by benevolent and relaxed physicians. The clinic uses a system that’s based on the latest neuroscientific research and which claims an 83 per cent success rate in curing phobias in just two days.

The patient is coached to confront their fear rather than avoiding it in a “confrontation room”. This new experience apparently creates an opportunity to rewire how the fear is stored in the brain, aided by the administration of a single dose of a beta-blocker, the medicine usually used to treat heart problems.

The first of 20 people featured in the series is Ollie, who is suffering from globophobia, or fear of balloons. It has become more acute since Ollie had two young children and an endless stream of balloon-filled children’s parties – my parental heart goes out to him.

He is gently but firmly led into a room full of the inflated globes and blindfolded while a psychologist, Vivian Metselaar, pops a few at random. This is a job that would delight sadists – although Metselaar is plainly not one as she explains that the clinic sees around 25 people each year with a fear of balloons. Who knew?

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After his beta blocker and a night’s sleep, Ollie returns seemingly cured. “The end of one life and the start of another,” as he puts it.

Meanwhile, Nicholas, a charmingly jittery London warehouse worker with musophobia – a fear of mice – is also treated successfully. Having screamed like a Bushtucker Trial contestant when first confronted with what he calls “horrid little creatures… so sneaky and disgusting”, by day two Nicholas allows them to clamber up his trouser leg.

But the treatment doesn’t work as well for Nina, who is scared of being a passenger in a vehicle – a relatable phobia to me, having recently been giving my teenage daughter driving lessons. Luckily, Nina is strapped into the back seat of the car before she decides to flee rather than confront her fear.

Nina’s amaxophobia stems from being in a friend’s mother’s car and noticing that the speedometer read 100 mph when she was nine years old. The programme could do with more backstories like this; I’m still unsure how Ollie first learned to be scared of balloons. Nicholas mentions a mouse-infested apartment triggering his musophobia, but there’s no further investigation.

I also would like a deeper delve into the neuroscience, but The Fear Clinic plainly doesn’t have any ambitions to stray into Hannah Fry territory. It is more about lives changed for the better – and the startling array of phobias out there.

They’ve even treated someone for a ghost phobia. “It’s generally not what we do here,” says Merel – unsurprisingly given the dearth of readily available ghosts in Amsterdam. Or anywhere else for that matter.

‘The Fear Clinic: Face Your Phobia’ continues next Tuesday at 9pm on Channel 4

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