There is only one truth for self-confessed ‘video junkie’ Rick Kirkham’the camera keeps rolling, no matter what.

When Kirkham was given his first video camera at 14, he began to record everything. From his role as dancer on ‘American Bandstand’ to national reporter for ‘Inside Edition’, Kirkham’s obsessive desire to remain centre screen, both in public and private, saw him film over three-thousand-hours of footage. Co-directed by Michael Cain and Matt Redecki, TV Junkie is the condensed result.

All Kirkham wants is ‘the perfect life’: he marries a nice girl from Texas, buys a gaudy house and fathers two sons. Yet despite his wealth, celebrity and all-American veneer, Kirkham’s bizarre home movie footage and video diaries reveal his descent into substance abuse and depression.

Like Tarnation (2003) and Capturing the Friedmans (2003), TV Junkie is the self-documented tale of a family’s implosion. Yet while the previous two films offer insight into the reasons behind these families’ dysfunction, even Kirkham’s confession’like diaries seem performative and guarded. They follow a familiar cycle of avowal, self-loathing and hollow promises. By halfway through the film, the audience began laughing at the repetition and clich‚àöÔøΩ of Kirkham’s proclamations.

Unlike Tarnation, in which self-documentation becomes a cathartic process for both the film-maker and the audience, TV Junkie is strangely devoid of hope or redemption. Kirkham is essentially an unsympathetic and egotistical character, whose need to record everything appears not as an attempt to capture reality, but rather a desire to shape it according to his own requirements.

Despite the film’s positive, somewhat forced conclusion, I left the theatre feeling the only insight I got into Kirkham was his insincerity. TV Junkie reflects the falsity and self-obsession of an era and culture besotted with celebrity and wealth, in which DIY implosion may become the closest thing to ‘reality’.