Happy talk
James Delingpole
The Day of the Kamikaze (Channel 4, Monday) was really good, I’ll bet, but the Fawn wasn’t having it so I suppose I’ll have to watch it some other time on my own. She’d rather be watching some old rubbish like Ladette to Lady (ITV1), which I sympathise with up to a point. It’s so nice in these ghastly times to find a programme whose fundamental underlying assumption is that toffs are better than oiks.
As a compromise, we settled for Imagine (BBC1, Tuesday), the first in a new series of Alan Yentob documentaries. This one was about self-help books, which I personally became strangely convinced by after interviewing Paul McKenna for this magazine. Yentob had a similar epiphany.
I quite understand why people who don’t read self-help books hate them so much. Partly it’s because they associate them with the poor, sad, desperate people you often see reading them on buses; partly it’s because they resent the grinning millionaires on the covers for having made so much money for old rope; mainly it’s because, frankly, they feel insulted that life problems as sophisticated as theirs can be solved with cheesy mantras, positive-thinking exercises, or wacko ideas such as there’s a ‘universal law of attraction’ which enables you to get exactly what you want if only you think the right thoughts.
That last bit is ‘the secret’ of a book by one Rhonda Byrne called The Secret, which so far has sold six million copies. Yentob was a bit sceptical about that one and he may have a point — all that squiggly, ancientmanuscript handwriting looks to me like a triumph of Dan Brown-esque marketing over content.
But then, if I hadn’t successfully tried some of the tricks in Instant Confidence, I’m sure I would have been equally dismissive of Paul McKenna. And if these books are really all such utter rubbish, why do so many people swear by them?
Speaking up for the sceptics — most articulately and stylishly too — was the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. How can these books possibly do what they’re supposed to do, he wondered, when happiness is by nature fleeting, when much of life is beyond our control, and when in the end we’re all going to die.
Against this was set the testimony of Cognitive Behavioural Therapists who believe that emotion follows thought and that consequently it is possible to think your way into happiness. One told a touching story about the patient who had first helped him reach this view. She was an elderly woman, severely depressed because she had achieved nothing of value in her life. Surely she had done something worthwhile, he suggested. Nothing, she said. So he asked her to go away and make a list.
Next week she came back utterly transformed. In the interim, it had suddenly occurred to her that actually it was no mean feat to have smuggled her family from Nazi Germany to America, and then supported them by scrubbing floors.
Yentob was most particularly impressed by the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who believes the secret of contentment is to live in the moment and do everything mindfully be it going for a walk or washing the dishes. ‘Yeah, right,’ went the Fawn and I. ‘Try having kids and a job.’ You couldn’t fail to be overawed, though, by Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, whose book Man’s Search For Meaning found that even amid the worst experience imaginable there is still a place for hope. Frankl made it his task in the death camp to persuade his fellow inmates why they shouldn’t commit suicide. If you rationalise that one, you can rationalise anything.
BBC Ten O’Clock News: can we take anything it says seriously any more? I’m beginning to think not. Sure, one has grown wearily used to its blatant geopolitical bias — Hamas and Hezbollah over Israel; Europe over Britain; pretty much everyone over America — but what really takes the biscuit is its sensationalist reporting of the big global-warming scare.
Last week, it covered a fairly bland Department of Health risk-assessment report on the effects of warmer weather. While playing up the death and disaster aspects for all it was worth, the BBC’s report managed completely to ignore the key fact about human mortality in periods of rising temperature: the extra number of people who’ll die because of the heat is far outstripped by the extra number who don’t because of the milder winters.
Finally, a word about That Mitchell and Webb Look (BBC2, Thursday): it’s comedy genius. I particularly liked the Carry On spoof about the doctor thrown out of a bawdy 1970s hospital for failing to grasp the difference between cheeky innuendo and outright filth. Inevitably, his superior suggested that he leave the hospital discreetly, via the back passage.
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