The truth will out... but the lies come quicker
HORIZON: A WEEK WITHOUT LYING
Wednesday - BBC2, 9pm
DRINKERS LIKE ME: ADRIAN CHILES
Monday - BBC2, 9pm
NOBODY ever said being a devout Catholic was easy. I think I probably realised at a very young age that I wasn’t really cut out for it.
Take the Eighth Commandment, for instance: thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. It is a nice idea and a noble aspiration, of course, but not exactly practical. Being economical with the truth from time to time seems to be part of human DNA.
Even at the age of six or seven, I’d worked that out while receiving – of all things – the sacrament of Confession.
I remember a priest asking me to list off any sins that required divine absolution, but I couldn’t think of anything that fitted the bill.
It ended with me telling him that I’d lied to someone or other a few days earlier, though I don’t think I actually had on this particular occasion.
So I ended up committing a sin just to get the whole palaver over with as quickly as possible. Talk about irony. Of course, the plain reality is that it is often simpler and kinder to tell a porkie pie or two.
Besides, there are plenty of circumstances in which people would prefer not to know the truth.
Nobody really wants to be told that, yes, their bum does indeed look ginormous in some particular item of apparel. I’d even go so far as to say that the vast majority of successful relationships – personal and professional alike – are based on mutual low-level deception or, at the very least, a distinct lack of candour.
Given that research suggests we tell an average of nine fibs every day of the week, the project at the centre of Horizon: A Week Without Lying was doomed from the outset. The programme – subtitled The Honesty Experiment – took three participants and set them the target of being entirely truthful for a week.
All the guinea pigs were fitted with wrist sensors and other devices to monitor heart rate, speed of movement and even perspiration levels.
Meanwhile, a team of experts analysed their body language and changes in speech
patterns. Suffice to say that telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth didn’t come easy.
One of the three, 37-year-old advertising professional Mo Saha, ended up in tears over her failure to stop speaking with forked tongue.
Another participant, an excitable 19-year-old student and YouTube enthusiast called Ehiz Ufuah, took to his sick bed when the going got too much.
To be brutally frank (honestly!), I’m not quite what the purpose of this exercise was. It was diverting enough in its own way, I suppose, but also pretty pointless.
I certainly hope the producers didn’t think they were about to come up with some groundbreaking findings, because I could have told them from the start that they were on a hiding to nothing. Not a word of a lie.
Earlier in the week, Drinkers Like Me: Adrian Chiles featured some rather uncomfortable detail about the 51-year-old broadcaster’s alcohol intake.
Mind you, the very fact that he willingly submitted himself to a documentary like this makes me think that booze mightn’t be the worst of his problems.
It struck me in some respects as being like a vanity project in reverse.
But maybe I’m doing him a disservice there. Chiles has always seemed like a decent bloke and he certainly delivered an interesting, thoughtprovoking hour’s worth of viewing here. Funnily enough, the most striking aspect of it all was the naked honesty.