TVScope: Put me together again Channel 4, Thursday, June 22nd, 10pm
In a week in which students were celebrating the end of exams and the excessive demands made on their memories, this poignant documentary was a stark reminder of just how fragile the construct of memory is.
It followed the progress of Kay and Robert, two patients in Liverpool's Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust, for one year.
There staff used therapy to try to retrieve the identities and personalities which Kay and Robert had lost as a result of brain injury.
The documentary worked best in its intimate portrait of the now 36-year-old Kay.
Four years earlier, she told her family she was "just popping out for 15 minutes". She was found later having been mugged and left for dead, a trauma-induced heart attack having starved her brain of oxygen.
Her story is the human one behind the shocking statistics. Some 10 per cent of the one million people admitted to hospital in Britain every year with head injuries will have suffered a brain injury.
For 3,000 of these victims, the brain damage will be so severe that they will require help for the rest of their lives.
Kay was left her with a memory which wipes itself clean every five minutes.
She lost her place in university, her fiance and her normal relationship with her daughter, Jessie, then just 11.
The poignancy of the title Put me together again was most evident with Kay, when we saw old film footage of her.
The halcyon images of a bubbly, carefree young woman, clearly besotted by her golden child, were a stark contrast to the three generations of crushed women we met in the documentary.
The once proud grandmother, now widowed, cares for Jessie and worries about what will happen Kay after her day.
The little girl with the blond ringlets has become a sad 15-year-old with "unresolved grief".
Her mum is not gone but, as Jessie put it, "everything got turned around, Mum is now like the child".
Sadly, Kay often feels like an abandoned child, as her amnesia means she does not remember Jessie's visits. The staff have to video the visits and constantly replay them to reassure her.
Kay has, however, managed to cling on to her love of her daughter and Jessie remains the focus of her life, and the main tool that the staff use to stimulate lost memories.
In contrast to the warm and intimate portrait of Kay, we were told only once that Robert had had a high flying career as an aerospace engineer.
The brain injury caused by a stroke left him experiencing strong anxiety.
Robert copes by compulsively hoarding objects - cups, sauce sachets and toilet rolls - and arranging them in patterns.
He becomes very aggressive when these items are removed and he swears and spits at the incredibly tolerant staff member.
He also says out loud what he is thinking, which includes crude sexually explicit comments about women.
In the absence of meeting Robert's family or hearing what he was like before his stroke, we do not have any sense of what the staff are trying to put together again.
We are left with the uncomfortable feeling of watching a man who is unaware that his brain injury has stripped him of his dignity.
The overall message of this documentary was, however, one of hope.
At the end of the year Kay remembered Jessie's real age for the first time .
We learned also from her story that it is what we love most in this life which survives, and which makes us truly human.
Olive Travers is a clinical psychologist.