If you've never had what you perceived to be a bad experience with a bouncer, you've probably never been drunk.

Luckily, Channel 4 picked Richie Davis and Len Harrhym's company to follow, or stand still next to, on the streets of Newport, it being one of the better examples of security services from what we were shown in this quite lovely documentary.

Filled with your usual shots of staggering townies, ineffectively thumping one another in the midriff, Bouncers tempered the chaos of bedlam with an insight into the lives of two or three of the doormen and showed them to be interesting human beings, which troubled the circulated stereotype that all bouncers are latent psychopaths. A misunderstanding formed, for the most-part, in the minds of insanely drunk people trying desperately to force their way into a club. So that they can get even more insanely drunk.

It turns out some bouncers are mainly bored, slightly melancholic and, in some cases, quite well read. Geraint, for example, quotes Oscar Wilde to camera and tells two drunk lads to get lost for being 'facetious' - only three syllables, admittedly, but still quite impressive. We also spent time with Jamie, the sensitive doorman of the Birdcage, one of two gay-friendly pubs in the town. Jamie lost a lot of weight before he moved to Newport and became engaged to his fiancée, and we got a bit of background on how he developed his understanding if quite nervous personality.

But it was Joe who stole the show, with his delightful turn of phrase and thousand-yard stare, the result of months spent watching intoxicated people swing at one another on a twice-weekly basis for no reason beyond absolute alcoholic frenzy. Looking around the streets as the bank holiday bustle swaggered and stumbled about the place, he looked positively defeated when he said 'Newport could be such a lovely town. But it's so full of dickheads that it is the way it is, if you know what I mean, like'.

You felt like patting him on the shoulder and reminding him that, at closing time in any small town in the UK, it's pretty much the same anywhere you go.