Happy talk

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.