The Anti-Social Network @9pm, Monday, BBC3- 8 out of 10

And so once again I return to a favourite reviewing ground of mine; the BBC3 documentary at 9pm on a Monday evening. Great to be back.

So, let’s run The Anti-Social Network stacks up against my BBC3 documentary checklist (patent pending). Celebrity presenter? Check. Fellow celebrity guests? Yup. Real life people like you or I interviewed? That’s there too. Content aimed at a young adult audience? Oh yeah.

Formula stuck to but that isn’t much of a problem. These days BBC3’s documentary making style has come on leaps and bounds since the bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping that was Hotter than my daughter. Hardcore issues are tackled and brought to a wider audience.

The celebrity in question hosting this show is Richard Bacon who, I’m not saying it to kiss arse, is a talented broadcaster from the hard broadcasting of Five Live in the afternoon to the slightly less hard broadcasting of...ummmm... “Richard Bacon’s Beer and Pizza club” on ITV4.

Everyone in the entire country now knows what trolling is as its no longer a phenomenon stuck to the Internet. It’s all over the national newspapers, including the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph which means old people now know what it is now and have something else to fear.

As the show explains a concept we all already know, there are two types of trolling. The first is random, usually anonymous abuse toward both celebrities and regular people over the Internet. This consists of largely mindless drivel but also real threats, all delivered from safely behind a monitor.

Most of us who post creative items on the Internet (whether as a writer or artist or whatever) have been there; this blog has a couple and another blog I write for takes on loads of awful, terrible, lame attempts at trolling. Easier enough to deal with but rather unpleasant to deal with.

However, other trolling of this type is seriously vindictive and includes abuse aimed at Bacon, his wife and his son. Elsewhere, it led to a 15 year-old boy hanging himself due to online abuse.

The other type is just as harrowing and involves tribute pages to young people who have tragically died being hijacked and causing distress to family and friends.

The documentary itself is, in a similar way to Britain’s Gay Footballers, the issues covered are largely common knowledge but greater exposure to the issue is always welcome, particularly when it’s done well.

And done well it is, aside from the frequent intermittent footage of iPad and Mac use (Apple had better of paid for this product placement) and Bacon on his phone to show off some modern technology to appeal to we yoof. Largely, the public infomercial element of the show isn’t too overbearing as to make it unbearable.

There are some fascinating insights into the murky world of trolling where there is something of an arms race between trollers and the law going on. As the former take over innocent people’s accounts, creating fake accounts, covering their tracks and so on, the police struggle to catch up with them. They’re success is obvious as only two trollers have ever been arrested under the 2003 Communications Act.

There is also the awesome sounding passion of troll hunting, such as a man by the (fake) name of “Michael Fitzpatrick” who tracks down trolls but fears for his safety as a result. The almost military planning that goes into trolling tribute pages for children Fitzpatrick outlined was particularly disturbing.

Bacon accuses suspected trollers but when they are confronted they do pretty much what they expect you to do; deny, deny, deny. Obviously it’s easier to be assertive and in your face when sat at a keyboard and not in person. Either they deny or their strange justification from trolling that largely a sympathetic comment from a random person on a tribute page isn’t right so needs readdressing. Twisted logic thy name is the Internet.