Emotional incontinence

This year will be remembered as the one in which the psychopathology of Britain slipped down the toilet. Just last month the imagination of the nation’s television viewers was captured — some would say hijacked — first by the comedy show Little Britain, with a series of sketches about a geriatric woman who is oblivious of her own urinary incontinence, and, secondly, by the sight (courtesy of infrared cameras) of Carol Thatcher taking a night-time pee beside her camp bed on I’m a Celebrity — Get Me Out of Here! And there’s no point in telling yourself that I’m the sad one for watching these programmes, or that they are fringe entertainment. Nearly ten million people tuned in to see Thatcher junior — the eventual winner of the shockingly compelling jungle ‘reality’ contest — whip down her Firm Control Low Leg panties and flout camp hygiene rules.

The significance of examining such preoccupations is that it enables us to build up a picture of the national archetype particular to the time. Thanks largely to a way of looking at the world first calibrated by Freud — the 150th anniversary of whose birth will be celebrated this coming year — we can analyse the national psyche through catchphrases, hero-choices, medical syndromes and reactions to events both serious and trivial. Sadly for 2005, the findings are deeply unattractive. In addition to an obsession with things scatological, we observe inner impoverishment, florid paranoia, and indiscriminate worship at the altar of celebrity.

Britain’s confused relationship with celebrity is an addiction compensating for an inner emptiness. A hundred years ago, this may have been filled by our interest in the goings-on of our own extended families. True, the cult of celebrity has been around for centuries: pilgrimages to shrines in the Middle Ages worked on the same basis of part manufactured myth, part personal benefit.