The climate of fear is crippling our mental health - Spiked, November 6, 2020

The climate of fear is crippling our mental health
Depression soared during the last lockdown. The second will cause yet more despair.

By Patrick West


The debate over lockdown is invariably framed in terms of that between two competing needs: the medical and the economic. On the one hand, there are those who say that the health of the nation and the imperative to protect the NHS must be paramount. On the other, there are the lockdown sceptics who say that people’s livelihoods and jobs must foremost be safeguarded from ruination.

A third factor is given paltry consideration, especially by government ministers: the issue of mental health. While it is acknowledged that lockdowns will affect the way we live, what is never admitted by the government – and often overlooked by mainstream anti-lockdown voices – is the devastating effect ‘staying indoors’ has had on our mental health.

One of the few outstanding voices has been Alice Thomson of The Times, who in a recent article related that the Office for National Statistics states that since the outbreak of the pandemic rates of depression have doubled from one in 10 to one in five. Among the most badly hit have been those aged 16 to 39, a group that has reported a 30 per cent rise in depressive symptoms. A paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggested that 18 per cent of UK adults reported having suicidal thoughts in the first months of lockdown. Meanwhile, in June the Institute for Alcohol Studies reported that almost a third of people had been drinking more.

Although some rates of depression and anxiety are directly related to the pandemic itself, a more common cause of these symptoms has been lockdown and government diktats over the summer. There have been countless reports and accounts of people driven to despair and depression by the loneliness, the spirit of paranoia and feeling of being watched and judged, with the ubiquitous masks giving a horrific sci-fi film aura to everyday life.

I myself, a healthy fortysomething, haven’t been afraid of the virus itself since April. But the state of British society in 2020 has sent me to despair and nightmarish gloom. So many millions feel the same. Is this the price we will have to pay for the next four weeks, for a not very lethal virus that is not currently the biggest killer in the UK? And what of the price we will have to pay in the future, with a vulnerable generation who grew up in a climate of fear, suspicion and paranoia? The actions of the government this year will have devastating effects in the future. We know the dire material fallout of Lockdown 2. Less well recognised will be its equally ruinous mental fallout.


John Sessions: autodidact extraordinaire

John Sessions, who died on Monday, wasn’t one to wear his learning lightly. The affable actor and comedian, best-known as a panellist on Channel 4’s Whose Line Is It Anyway? and protagonist on the BBC’s surreal comedy-drama, Stella Street, was an unashamed and conspicuous brainbox and polymath.

He could recite verbatim Finnegans Wake. He did one man stagings of Chekov. He could impersonate Keith Richards, Michael Caine and Al Pacino, flaunt his copious encyclopaedic knowledge on QI, adapt himself to the cinema with ease, or, on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, improvise the scenario of Ernest Hemingway going to the dentist or James Joyce at the seaside.

Sessions admitted that his public persona of ‘Mr Swotty’ could be irksome and that his immodest displays of erudition made him a ‘bit punchable’. The actor Timothy Spall described him as ‘a bit of a clever dick’. In one famous edition of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, in which contestants were asked to portray the person with whom they would least like to be trapped in a lift, Paul Merton stepped forward and said: ‘Hello, my name’s John Sessions.’

He blamed his ‘over-compensatory urge to intellectualise’ and tendency to show off on the fact that, unlike so many of his thespian and comedic contemporaries, he did not go to Oxbridge, having studied at Bangor University instead. However, Sessions had displayed attention-seeking tendencies even as a boy.

His life is a reminder of an eternal, profound truth: that feelings of insecurity and social inferiority needn’t be a bad thing, but quite the opposite. Sessions had what Alfred Adler called an Inferiority Complex, something the Austrian psychotherapist believed was a good thing, a beneficent state of mind that motivates an individual to seek power and recognition.

And so why shouldn’t this brilliant autodidact have flaunted his acquired knowledge and abundance of talent? If you put in the hard graft you earn the right to parade your significant cerebral wares.


Wokeness long predates Twitter

During this year we’ve all had to find more ways to entertain ourselves indoors. Mine has been reading more books than I would naturally, especially rereading escapist or humorous literature in order to lift the spirits. This has entailed taking recourse to some collected works of Peter Simple.

‘Peter Simple’ was a column that appeared in the Daily Telegraph from the mid-20th century until 2006. From the 1960s, it was written by Michael Wharton. It blended orthodox Tory invective with flights of fancy, with Wharton inventing a fantasy world full of right-on (or in today’s parlance, ‘woke’) grotesques, such as Mrs Dutt-Pauker the enormously rich and privileged north London socialist; Neville Dreadberg, the self-publicising and talentless avant-garde artist and writer of the ‘classic documentary television plays’ dealing with crime, corruption and cannibalism; Dr Heinz Kiosk, the psychoanalyst who concludes every invective with the bellicose refrain ‘We Are All Guilty!’; and Dr Spacely-Trellis, the Bishop of Bevindon, who is so achingly progressive that he barely believes in God at all.

As you can glean from this list, such characters wouldn’t be out of place in a satire today. This is because their real-life equivalents are very much with us. One entry from 1964 stuck out. It features Dr Spacely-Trellis defending a poster depiction of a nude Christ in the face of opposition from crusty conservatives, and it reminds us that the paradox of those preaching liberal tolerance using hateful language long predates Twitter. The passage concludes:

‘“The people who are objecting to this poster are the sort who voted Tory at the General Election. As Christians we must be charitable and understanding to this filthy subhuman scum”, he added, his face turning purple and his eyes starting out of his head. “But I would not care to be in their shoes on Judgement Day.’”

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, 'Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times', is published by Societas.

The BBC’s bid to axe left-wing comedy will fail - Spectator Coffee House, September 3, 2020

 

The BBC’s bid to axe left-wing comedy will fail
Patrick West

People of a conservative or Eurosceptic disposition should be thankful that the BBC's new director general, Tim Davie, is to address the widely-held perception that its comedy output is disproportionately left-wing. For years, listeners and viewers of the likes of The News Quiz, The Now Show, Mock The Week and Have I Got News For You have been subjected to – and bored by – an endless stream of quips and invectives at the expense of the Conservative party, Donald Trump and Brexiteers. According to a Daily Telegraph report, the BBC is to tackle this imbalance. Some of these shows might even be axed altogether.

Yet this could be a difficult task. Although the liberal-left or woke nature of much BBC satire and political comedy can be grating, it is, alas, intrinsic to its nature. These shows are mostly aimed at herd-minded twenty-somethings, for whom parroting one's anti-Brexit, anti-Trump, Tory-bashing opinions is not only a matter of pride, but serves as generational, tribal glue.

Most stand-up comedians duly cater for these viewpoints, and in doing so, also satisfy their own needs. As the Dave channel series Comedy Against Living Miserably has illustrated, many comedians today conform to the stereotype of the sad clown, the figure who on stage makes us laugh but in private suffers from profound unhappiness. An episode on Sunday that featured Seann Walsh, Suzi Ruffell and Nish Kumar – the latter an obsessive anti-Brexiteer – revealed how deeply insecure they were and how a bad gig would plunge them into a week-long bout of depression.

To judge from Comedy Against Living Miserably, most popular TV stand-up comedians are insecure souls who seek plaudits from strangers to boost their fragile ego and feel better about themselves. And you don't win plaudits from young people by articulating sensible or unfashionable or conservative opinions. Hence the bias we see today. It's the result of a symbiotic relationship between crowd and performers, each seeking confirmation from the other.

This is why conservative stand-up comedians are so rare on TV and radio. Simon Evans and Geoff Norcott are exceptions, with the latter's awkward appearance on Mock The Week only highlighting that show's ingrained liberal-left tendency.

Right-wing comedy is anyway less suited to the vocal, audience-based format in our woke culture, in which causing offence has become one of the most grievous transgressions. Right-wing and conservative humour is less chummy, luvvie and ingratiating, and can often be cruel, outrageous and brutally honest. Think Ricky Gervais or Frankie Boyle. While both offensive stand-ups wouldn't classify themselves as classically right-wing, both inveigh against political correctness and both are inherently obsessed with man's fallen nature.

Conservative – and thus necessarily pessimistic – satire is better digested in print, alone in the private sphere, where we can laugh inwardly at things we know we can't find funny in public. It's where we can recognise that which we know to be true, when saying what is true might land us in trouble with the law or with our bosses. The best satire is read, not heard, whether it be the misanthrope Jonathan Swift having Gulliver urinating on a queen's home to put out a fire, or Viz having my generation wetting ourselves at the angry feminist Millie Tant and the absurdly right-on Modern Parents.

The foremost written-word conservative satirist today is Andrew Doyle, creator of the preposterous woke caricature, Titania McGrath. And Doyle's monster enjoys a noble pedigree; she could easily have been dreamt up by the late Michael Wharton, who for the second half of the twentieth century and early part of this one, wrote the Daily Telegraph's semi-fantastical 'Peter Simple' column.

Wharton populated his fictional world, 'Stretchford', with liberal-left grotesques: Hampstead intellectuals, barmy social workers, supinely liberal Tories, trendy vicars. The pinnacle of his creation was the psychoanalyst Dr Heinz Kiosk, who invariably concluded his monologues with the bellicose refrain: 'We are all guilty!' This might as well be the actual motto of today's liberal-left.

That the BBC is funded by you and me, whereas print satire is not, is an important matter. So the political imbalance of its comedy panel shows should at least be investigated. But I'm not sure it's going to be a success story, certainly not without alienating the audience that currently does like to be reassured of its anti-Brexit and anti-Trump righteousness.

From Punch in the 19th century to P.J. O'Rourke to Auberon Waugh to Craig Brown to Titania McGrath, if it's grown-up, nuanced political humour and satire you want, refer to books, newspapers, magazines or the internet. Let the lefties have the airwaves. They and their pliant audiences are quite good at it, to be fair. Yet they'll never match the refined and elevated humour of conservatives, who always find comedy in the more cerebral and less conformist medium of the written word.