Television
If, as Alan Duncan suggests, the Tories need a new rallying call, the proposition that new Labour sends you mad could be it. The clinical psychologist Oliver James, whose book Britain on the Couch last year invented the phrase "the low serotonin society", argues it forcibly in New Britain on the Couch, a two-part series on Sundays on Channel 4. The addition of "new" to the title sharpens James's political point. Tony Blair appears in clips like some Big Brother whipping us on to higher educational standards and greater commercial endeavour. Elected in hope, Blair, James says, may be lowering supplies of the neurotransmitter even further. New Britain, new depressive illnesses.
Whereas I have always considered us a slothful and low-achieving nation, James sees us as ambitious and driven, yea even unto despair and suicide. Last week's episode began with a home movie of the James family on a beach in prelapsarian 1958, looking forward to prosperity and freedom. It cut to a product of that future: Karen, a glossy, well-paid television executive with a nice boyfriend, nice flat in Chelsea and nice weekend cottage. Yet, at 32, she wanted to press an imaginary button marked "DIE". "It's total self-loathing," she said.
Although Karen clearly traced her neurotic perfectionism to her over-critical mother, James preferred to believe that she had internalised the naggings of an over-critical society. Soon, he argued, there would be ten times as many Karens, a prediction that, like many of his statistics, deserved to be argued over. How many of the one-in-five of us who are depressed at any one time are actually anything at all like Karen? And how many of us are, say, the bereaved or the recently divorced? Depression rates are up since the 1950s, but how much is that because doctors are now willing to name it? And if, for every person on anti- depressant drugs, five more would qualify, does that reflect a deeply depressed population or a nation of prescription-happy GPs? (What astonished me most in Karen's case was that when she broke down in tears in her GP's surgery and was carted off to hospital, the medics' solution was to double the dose of Prozac she was already on.)
Still, James had a theory to bash home and to do so he turned on the nation's teachers and parents. Where Blair saw too little pursuit of excellence and too much tolerance of mediocrity in our schools, James saw too much pursuit and too little tolerance. He took us to Dulwich College where the boys talk about "six starred As" as if their lives depend on it, to Oxford, where the story of a talented student's suicide was told in lurid detail, and a crazy-sounding agency called Future Kids where toddlers are taught computer skills. The examples were deeply worrying, as they were meant to be, but I felt I could cheer James up by taking him to the chaos of my godsons' sitting-rooms, by showing him a Young Ones tape, or asking Chris Woodhead to accompany him on a week of inner-city school inspections.
This Sunday, James's targets change to the mass media, advertising and the acquisitive society. He introduces us to a shopaholic, a beauty myth victim who believes her body too fat and her hair colour unexciting, and a low-achieving couple called Harry and Tina who suffer when Harry's job squirting beer into barrels is modernised. Bribed to work 12-hour shifts, Harry cracks up and is eventually prescribed a drug that helps him cope. This incenses James, who feels that Harry, off drugs, is the sane one in a mad society.
Each age produces those who think it uniquely bad and James is one of ours, a diffident, kindly, mousy figure who ferrets at the heels of advanced capitalism. He wears ramblers' clothes, takes the coach to visit his subjects and boasts of his appalling school reports. He looks very much like a member of a profession that talks only to the unhappy. Had he interviewed another Harry and Tina, Manhattan's Evans and Brown, he might, for example, have concluded that the current whirligig suits some people very well.
Every now and again, he suggests that even he - who did not see a TV ad until he was ten - has been sucked into the rat race. Perhaps he has. Perhaps the pressure to sell books has made him overstate his case. Or, perhaps, he has genuinely never considered that chipping coal from the depths of mine shafts, digging potatoes from frozen fields or flying bombers over wartime Germany may have lowered serotonin too. He condemns new Britain on the basis that half a million of its citizens use Ecstasy every week but does not damn Georgian society for turning its poets to opium or the Victorian age for leading its mothers to gin. His is essentially the case made by the Greens ten years ago, the hippie movement 30 years ago, and Dickens a century back. The only difference is that he expresses it medically. It is always worth making, but there is nothing new about it.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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