Saturday column: Marching to the lifestyle fascists

(Due to technical difficulties, this didn’t appear on Saturday.)

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ON WEDNESDAY night, RTÉ1 broadcast a new series, Not Enough Hours, in which a man with a clipboard and a camera crew came to the aid of a workaholic.

At the start, the workaholic was filmed slogging all the hours he could.

After half an hour, he had transformed into a contender for Dad of the Year. This is the miracle of television. A man with a clipboard and a camera crew can improve a life in less time than it takes you to realise that there are not enough hours in the day to waste on watching Not Enough Hours.

Nobody’s life is perfect and RTÉ is currently obsessed with reminding us of this on a near-nightly basis. The trend began with the original man with the clipboard - Eddie Hobbs - whose Show Me The Money laid the foundations for the life-coach shows that have piled onto the schedules since. How Long Will You Live?, Health Squad, Operation Transformation, What Am I Worth?, Families in Trouble, I’m An Adult, Get Me Out of Here . . . it’s a long list.

You’d wonder how humanity made it this far without someone with a clipboard standing over early man and telling him how much more quickly he’d evolve if he’d just sharpen his flint differently. British television also suffered this virus until recently, most notably through Trinny and Susannah’s popular but remorseless attempts at nagging the individuality from women.

The genre eventually hit rock bottom with Dinner PartyInspectors, in which nags nitpicked at a person’s inability to set a table in a funky fashion.

Things never quite recovered from that, and British channels moved on to gladiatorial shows that threw couples together Wife Swap-style - so turning the viewing public into the nitpicking nags, holding their noses at the carry-on of people lower down the lifestyle ladder. RTÉ, though, is still going through every conceivable idea that it can adapt to the original format, and Not Enough Hours might not be the end. The problem is that, while superficially good intentioned, these programmes add only to the landfill of self-help books, newspaper agony aunts, phone-in radio shows and afternoon talk shows that collectively define a lifestyle fascism.

RTE’s shows, by the way, are occasionally quite good. For instance, David Coleman has been a monotonous, glowering, yet thoroughly excellent and insightful presenter of Families in Trouble. But while programmes individually offer something positive, namely an opportunity to take control of your problems, the irony is that they exude a collective negativity. They are telling us that we don’t have enough time, enough money, enough health, enough motivation, enough respect from our kids or even enough cop-on to log on to a website and find a house ourselves without having our hand held by a man with a clipboard and a camera crew.

Our lives, they suggest, are broken. In fact, several bits of our lives are broken. We fix one part of it, and a crack appears somewhere else.

Perhaps more insidious is not just how they give the impression that everything is fixable, but that they promote the idea that there is a standard level of happiness to which everyone must aspire. And that notional standard is usually set by some know-it-all life coach with a smugness that makes you want to visit their house and ransack every tiny detail of their lives for the flaws that must run through them.

The proliferation of self-help guides and life coaches feed and live off a culture in which people are persuaded that they can attain some higher domestic wisdom, when the reality is that life is messy, perfection is a myth and that we are actually happy with that status quo.We know this because survey after survey confirms it. But the money is in fixing things, whether they are broken or not, so various wings of modern culture collude in not only helping you but criticising you.

They are like army sergeants intent on breaking a person down before remoulding him as an identikit of the guy next to him.

Civilians, though, don’t work like that. And surely there is no greater proof of this than in the fact that the self-help industry has been growing exponentially for decades now, and yet we all still stumble through an imperfect life with a head full of advice and well-meaning intentions. And most of us do it quite successfully.

So lifestyle fascism continues, transformed into television shows that offer wisdom, but actually deliver negativity and a little prurience. Their success suggests that, for the moment, we buy into that. Yet, it’s worth asking instead how we have somehow survived and prospered despite our supposed inabilities to get out of bed without help from a lifecoach.

But there are no ratings in that.