What gets your goat? Satirist Joe Queenan certainly knows what annoys him: German tourists, smartphone users, overly peppy cashiers, airports …the list goes on. Don’t let his soporific, NPR-ready voice fool you: the anecdotal examples of his anger exploding (such as smearing a foe’s car with onions from a hot dog stand) show a man whose red mist is never completely absent. So it seems logical that following Brief Histories of Irony and Blame he should investigate the red devil in A Brief History Of Anger (BBC Radio 4)
Tackling it in all its forms (“suppressed anger, outright anger and the occasional strop”), Queenan attempts to trace the origin of the emotion. But as he discovers, there are no definitive answers to why Euripides wrote about the murderous Medea, why the ancient Greek gods were always raging and what really inspired Dante’s Inferno.
So instead of doing what it says in the title, the programme flirts speculatively with some interesting ideas. One is that the internet “is one-third porn and two-thirds anger, resentment and rage”, another is that good politicians use their ire like a good, stage-managed soundbite, turning it on “to draw an audience in” (according to John Sergeant). Most illuminating, however, is the section on “good anger”. Psychologist Oliver James suggests that anger actually makes the world go round and is “crucial for creativity and social change”, while Matthew Parris argues that the best sort of anger is the righteous kind, which “looks good and sounds good”.
Perhaps the programme makers could have done with a bit more anger themselves, because A Brief History Of Anger can’t really decide what it wants to be: a great collection of material from the archive (including the likes of Trotsky, Russell Crowe and Chris Moyles losing it, live on air) or a more thorough and thoughtful analysis? We end up with neither and instead get something pitched between Grumpy Old Men and an imagined bank holiday special called The 50 Best Angry Moments Ever! Which, depending on how you see it, is just another thing to tick you off.
