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Happy talk

James Delingpole

Wednesday, 20th February 2008

Imagine (BBC1); Ten O'Clock News (BBC1); That Mitchell and Webb Look (BBC2)

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, ancient-manuscript 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.

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