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The Happiness Formula
The Impressionists
New Street Law
Lost
My mother once told me that she didn't think I was 'built for pleasure', while my wife recently claimed to see negativity rolling off me in dark glowering waves. But am I happy? Certainly not. And herein lies the difficulty of defining happiness, with one man's gloom often proving to be another's morbid delight.
But in The Happiness Formula (Wednesday, BBC2), the presenter Mark Easton claimed that it's now possible to measure levels of happiness scientifically. This enabled him to skip anything as awkward as a definition of happiness and head straight to the lab.
'Is happiness genuinely tangible?' he asked a neuroscientist, who paused for some time before replying - none too helpfully under the circumstances - 'You're asking me a very difficult question.'
Easton, however, was undeterred and proceeded to talk excitedly about how wonderful this new science of happiness was and how many 'remarkable conclusions' had resulted from it. As he did so, I realised that one of the few things that can be guaranteed to bring me down from my customary Cloud Nine to Cloud Eight and a half is listening to infuriatingly cheery presenters who insist on telling viewers that something is remarkable without giving them the opportunity to decide for themselves.
But while the rules governing happiness may still be a bit hazy, those governing this sort of programme are rather more straightforward. In essence, they hold that anything of an even mildly philosophical bent must include at least one celebrity in the first 15 minutes to make it palatable for a mainstream audience. Here, Midge Ure, late of Ultravox and Live Aid, recalled how collecting sports...