Human misery distilled

In the world of the quietly desperate, a planet that orbits the home of the unutterably sad, Carolyn is struggling.

"I would cry while I was doing the laundry, doing the dishes again," she says.

Now Carolyn is spending 14 hours a day on the internet, or on "Second Life" to be more specific, a virtual world where there are no dishes and no laundry.

On Second Life, in fact, there is no Carolyn as we come to know her on Investigate: Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love (Documentary Channel, tonight, 8.30pm).

Instead she has replaced herself with an avatar; an avatar with an impossibly ample bosom, and not enough clothing to cover its virtual cleavage.

"I want to be able to do, and see, and experience things that I can't when I'm married to you," she tells her husband, a man for whom quiet desperation is more than just a way of life, it is a career.

He looks on impotently while the 37-year-old suburban American mother of four - or her avatar at least - embarks on a passionate affair with Elliot, from London, England.

She taps away on her keyboard of dreams; her husband has been exiled to the couch.

"I love my wife; she's a beautiful woman, still.

She's just a little confused," is his summation of his wife dumping him and taking up, virtually, with another man.

That man - Elliot - is quite the catch.

Elliot's avatar, a muscled hulk not at all like Elliot, never wears a top.

"Just jeans and weapon," the man at the height of his intellectual powers tells us.

"Right now I've got a sword and two Uzis, an extension of how I would look."

How he would look, perhaps, if fact was fiction, and fiction was fact.

But reality, sadly, muscles its way in when Elliot tires of the relationship.

Carolyn cries for days, while the show drifts from pathos into a state so pitiable, so wretched and sodden with melancholy, it becomes almost unwatchable.

"I love you the way you love him," her husband wails pathetically from the other room.

She books a flight for London, while her husband begins to wonder if she is "crossing the line".

And the kids?"I think they'll be fine," she says, "they'll be fine" as she heads east to her fate.

Virtual Adultery is more than the sort of train wreck from which it is impossible to look away.

It distills human misery, pours it into a test tube with a dose of helplessness, boils it down until nothing but anguish and desolation remain, and serves it cold with a side order of wretchedness.

You must watch this show.