Spaced-out Cary Grant, Dietrich in a gorilla suit . . . it’s a surreal trip!

There’s an oft-told hack’s tale about the hollywood journalist who wired a terse inquiry, ‘how old Cary Grant?’, to the star’s agent.

As suave and witty in life as he was on screen, the actor himself sent a telegram back: ‘ Old Cary Grant fine. how you?’

It turns out the reporter posed entirely the wrong question. he should have asked, ‘how high Cary Grant? — and the reply might have been, ‘ stoned Cary Grant out of tiny skull. Wow man.’

Alan Yentob’s mind- expanding documentary, Imagine . . . Becoming Cary Grant (BBC1), revealed the five-times-married British star, who tried every therapy from hypnotism to yoga and mystic religions, found inner peace in his 60s through a course of LsD trips.

Once a week, he would spend five hours on a psychiatrist’s couch, banging wide the doors of perception while his chain-smoking doctor kept a watchful eye in case the spaced-out star got the notion to try flying out of an upstairs window. Yentob used this as a framing device for his film, treating each aspect of Grant’s life story as a collection of fragmented, drugsoaked memories.

And some of those memories were grim. Grant was born in edwardian Bristol, to working class parents who couldn’t afford to heat their house. his elder brother died after their mother elsie accidentally caught the boy’s thumb in a door: the injury turned gangrenous and, without antibiotics, proved fatal.

elsie spent more than 20 years in a lunatic asylum. Young Cary was told his mother had gone on holiday and wasn’t coming back. small wonder he had a lifelong fear of being abandoned. ‘You’re just a bunch of molecules till you know who you are,’ he complained at the end of his life.

Yentob’s problem was illustrating this surreal material. he had access to the star’s home movies but, unlike for example the private cine reels shot by Peter sellers, there was nothing very remarkable about Grant’s personal films. he didn’t hang out with other stars or royalty, and he preferred to stay behind the camera.

This meant dipping into the actor’s hollywood catalogue, for suitably acid-tinged clips. We saw a bizarre glimpse of Marlene Dietrich in a gorilla suit, and a couple of shots of Grant doing backflips: he started showbiz life as a music hall acrobat.

But most of the footage was borrowed from his best-known films, from Bringing Up Baby with Katharine hepburn to the hitchcock masterpieces such as suspicion, Notorious and North By Northwest. Despite the fine readings by Jonathan Pryce from Grant’s unpublished autobiography (why on earth it remains unpublished, we weren’t told), the effect of these movie extracts was to make me wish I was watching the whole films. Nothing in Grant’s sad, drugaddled ramblings could compare to his brilliance on screen.

Informer (BBC1) continues to have overtones of a bad drugs trip. small- time dealer and police spy raza ( Nabhaan rizwan) suffered a cascade of flashbacks at a wedding, which provoked him into a violent assault on a waiter.

Back at home, he laid into his amiable father, boasting that he was the head of the family now. We’re meant to believe that raza is suffering psychological trauma from all his undercover ordeals, but I suspect he’s just a chemical casualty.

Flashbacks, arrogance, paranoia, outbursts of temper: raza has popped too many pills and now he’s paying the price.

Don’t ask me to have sympathy — the nasty little oik was happy to sell them to his friends. strange choice for a hero.