TV REVIEW : DOCUMENTARY ON DRUNK DRIVING IS STRONG STUFF

“Drinking & Driving: The Toll, the Tears” is extremely difficult to watch. It had to have been even more difficult to make.

Which is as it should have been. For this is no ordinary documentary about the perils of drunk driving. The producer and host, Kelly Burke, was required to make it as an alternative to going to jail for killing a man while driving drunk in 1984.

The hourlong program, airing at 8 tonight on Channels 24 and 50, at 9 p.m. on Channel 15 and at 10 p.m. on Channel 28, is in part Burke’s story, and that of the woman whose husband he killed. It is also the stories of other victims and drunk drivers who provide first-person accounts of how their lives have been tragically and irrevocably altered by alcohol.

The documentary should be required viewing in traffic schools, driver education classes and treatment programs for alcohol and drug dependency. It spells out in tearful detail the grim stakes of the game that Burke calls “American roulette”: the assumption of drinkers that “because they made it home so many times before, they’ll make it home every time.”

Burke, a reporter at WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., doesn’t have much to offer in the way of solutions; he appeals to the drinker’s self-interest. “Believe me, you do not want to go through this,” he says near the end of the program. “You do not want a relative or a friend to go through this.”

However, in a postscript to the documentary, Phil Donahue chides Americans for their hypocritical attitude about drinking and suggests some possible changes, such as requiring warning labels on alcoholic beverages, similar to those on cigarettes; producing TV commercials that warn of the dangers of overindulgence, and passing tougher laws to punish drunk drivers.

It is in the latter area that “Drinking & Driving” may have its greatest impact. Judges, prosecutors and lawmakers who see it are likely to remember it a lot longer than alcoholics will.