Bernard Ingham: Stiff upper lip trembles in the face of TV’s exhausting emotional overload

By definition, you had to be fit – or lucky – to come through the 1920s and 1930s when tuberculosis, rickets, diphtheria, scarlet fever and later war and polio lay in wait and virtually everybody smoked. The top decks of buses and the average pub snug had their very own peasouper.

You didn’t suck a lemon slice at half time in your soccer match, you had a fag.

Industrial relations were conducted in the unhealthiest climate you could imagine, usually into the early hours at the Department of Employment where I worked. The cleaners not only needed a dustcart to take away the cigarette butts and ash; they also had extensively to fumigate those smoke-filled rooms with ozone.

Liver-wrecking amounts of booze were drunk on these occasions and some participants turned up extremely well-oiled before a conciliatory word had been uttered or the beer and sandwiches brought out.

This is not to mention the liquid lunches of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. By comparison, mid-day Britain is now an alcohol-free zone.

On top of all this, we now discover from research in Pennsylvania that our very psyche was doing us no good at all throughout these indulgent years. The stiff upper lip may 
have seemed admirable but American scientists now advise us we might have been better off without it. It may have helped us cope with stress beyond our control. but it was no help at all if it just encouraged us to accept our lot and do nothing to try to change things.

You will not be surprised to hear that I received this intelligence with a stiff upper lip. Like other old folk, I am used to being told a bit late in the day what is good and bad for me.

But what I can’t work out is why the Pennsylvanian intelligentsia ever bothered. It is decades since the USA was noticeably afflicted with a stiff upper lip and it exists in Britain only among us greybeards.

Indeed, one of the most remarkable changes in human behaviour is how Britons over the second half of the 20th century ceased to bottle anything up at all. I blame television.

Too often there would be vast gaps in TV bulletins if some unfortunate victim or his relative were not blubbering incoherently all over the screen. The prime requirement of any interviewee is that he or she – but preferably he – should not just let his emotions hang out but also flow freely down his face before he buries his head in his hands in utter despair

By now I have seen so many convicted killers weeping buckets over those they have slain before being arrested that – yes, I confess it – my stiff upper lip curls viciously in disbelief at these police parades. Most entertainment programmes I have the misfortune to tune into seem to require a vast participatory audience of lively young things who scream or groan to order. Restraint, it seems, went out with the Ark.

Then take the average demo. The modern protester is not one who seeks to impress by the restraint with which he puts over his message. Instead, he or she makes it a Hollywood production with lights, action and music as banners are waved for the benefit of the cameras and slogans are bawled or sung through usually defective microphones.

Nor can you escape it on and off the football field. News reporting of some epic event is incomplete without its clichéd shots of moronic supporters, swathed in flags, uninhibitedly shouting “Ingerland”, or whatever.

On the pitch, the average forward leaves the staff at 
the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts lost in wonder at their simulation of death from a thousand trips.

And then there is that modern affliction called post-traumatic stress disorder. My generation knows a lot about shell shock and has considerable sympathy for veterans of such hell-holes as Iraq and Afghanistan.

But post-traumatic distress order seems to have reached epidemic proportions among the civilian population. It could only happen in a nation that has almost systematically bred the stiff upper lip out of its genes.

Somebody should tell those Yankees. Forget the stiff upper lip. It’s old hat. What we want to know is what this outpouring of human emotion is doing for the longevity of the human race? It looks to be very wearing.