The other day I had one of those blood-boiling moments that sometimes coincide with leaving the house. You know the sort of thing: I was trying to retrieve a package from the UK’s most poorly sited postal sorting office; I got stuck in traffic, couldn’t park and found myself at the back of a long queue leading to a window staffed, it seemed, by no one. I had a choice of standing either just inside or just outside the automatic double doors, which opened and closed continuously due to my presence. I started to judder like a washing machine spinning a wet duvet.
According to The Truth About Stress (BBC1), I was experiencing a classic fight-or-flight reaction – adrenaline rush, elevated heart rate – which may have been of some use to our foraging ancestors, but can be a bit counterproductive in a modern urban setting. What’s more, it can make you ill: stress is said to account for half of all British sick days, and has a role to play in cancer, anxiety, depression and heart trouble.
I chose flight – leaving the sorting office empty-handed – because I was parked illegally and had no idea whether I actually wanted the package; all I knew was that it was too big for my letterbox. In the course of her investigations, presenter Fiona Phillips seemed intent on provoking stress, introducing volunteers to live snakes and spiders to trigger the brain’s fear centre, the amygdala. Phillips agreed to go on an adventure-park zip line, which was clearly not her sort of thing. In fact, a good deal of The Truth About Stress involved watching Phillips freak out – she laughed maniacally as she put on the harness, while her eyes darted around in search of an escape route.
Her zip-line plunge was undertaken to illustrate a notion put forward by Professor Ian Robertson, who holds that stress and excitement are physiologically indistinguishable, and that you can convert one to the other through a little mind control, in this case by getting Phillips to shout: “I am excited!” just before she jumped off the platform. If you’re enthusiastic enough about stress, it becomes fun.
A related experiment involved office workers singing karaoke, with half the group making an effort to stay calm, and the other half trying to process their fear into something more go-getting. Apparently, the latter group performed better, although nobody performed well.
This theme repeated itself throughout the programme: some interesting ideas illustrated with some fairly silly stunts, such as making football fans eat doughnuts to show that the stress caused by losing one-nil to Doncaster makes food taste less sweet. The experiment proved nothing, and I was happy to take their word for it anyway.
It was also a personal journey for Phillips, a formerly stressed-out breakfast TV presenter, who has de-stressed so successfully that the telomeres capping the ends of her chromosomes remain in place. Chronic stress might otherwise have sheared them off, said an expert in cellular gerontology she called “Professor Thomas Von Slinky”, but whose surname is spelled Von Zglinicki.
This helpful and well-intentioned programme may have been hampered by the inescapable fact the best remedies for stress are simple and well-known: diet, exercise and mindfulness were the recommended top three. And for God’s sake: just tick the box that says you want them to redeliver the package next week.
If you like your stress by proxy, then Car Crash Britain (ITV) is for you. On the BBC, that title might have heralded an exploration of overstretched public services, political malfeasance, dissolving communities and crumbling infrastructure. Here, it is taken literally: it’s a bunch of car crashes edited together. Like most of the traffic accident genre, it’s a familiar blend of bonnet-crunching footage, inane narration (“Paying attention is recommended on all roads, but especially on motorways”) and repeated assurances that, “Amazingly, no one was seriously injured,” in the upside-down fireball you see before you.
What’s different? Chiefly, the additional “4m dash cams and drones” now servicing this form of programming. One driver seemed to specialise in capturing examples of level-crossing idiocy.
But Car Crash Britain also included interviews with a few lucky escapees. Former policeman Ian was on a birthday jaunt to see Jurassic Park when his car was clipped by a lorry with such force that the dash cam spun round to show his wife’s terrified face. Neither were hurt, but when the car finally came to a stop, Ian found that his boxer shorts were full of broken glass. That’s the kind of detail that made the whole thing worth watching.
