If animals trigger stress, why isn’t Attenborough a gibbering wreck?

When you can’t find a parking space within three streets of your house, that’s stressful. When the supermarket selfservice check-out machine freezes because there’s an ‘unrecognised item in the bagging area’ and you’re already late for the school gates, that’s really stressful.

And when you get a credit card bill, a final demand for the gas and a parking ticket all on the same day, and the youngest has chickenpox, and you’ve lost your phone, and the dog escapes, that’s meltdown time. Stress isn’t one thing — it’s everything at once.

The Truth About Stress (BBC1) failed to grasp that basic fact. Instead, presenter Fiona Phillips tried to persuade us that we could turn all those churning negative emotions into happy thoughts, just by saying ‘I am excited!’ when anxiety struck.

Then she took a zip wire ride and to nobody’s surprise she found it exciting, not stressful. This wasn’t exactly science telly at its finest.

Less convincing yet was a trip to a Midland zoo’s reptile house, where three volunteers handled a magnificent fluffy tarantula and a rare red python. Fiona insisted this would trigger their primal stress responses, but that’s nonsense.

For anyone who isn’t actually snake- and- spider phobic, the encounter would be a fascinating experience. If all humans are genetically programmed to be stressed out by wild animals, as Fiona claimed, why isn’t Sir David Attenborough a gibbering wreck?

What’s so odd is that Fiona does understand stress. In her memoir about caring for her parents, whose lives were both devastated by early onset Alzheimer’s, she wrote about the pressures of coping with worry, guilt, children, employers and the horrors of dementia, all at once.

If she had been allowed to talk more about this, instead of dismissing it as an aside, the show might have been more useful. Instead, it was shallow and bitty, full of trite advice and half-hearted experiments. It felt as though it had been put together by a handful of junior researchers, too young to know what real stress was.

There was no mention of tranquilisers, though two generations of GPs handed them out like Smarties to anyone who claimed to be fraying at the edges.

For that matter, stress and alcohol go together like a Bank holiday and torrential rain: they make each other so much worse. Yet Fiona said nothing about booze.

For viewers who weren’t feeling stressed enough already, the dash- cam footage of suicidally selfish and aggressive drivers on Car Crash Britain: Caught On Camera (ITV) was liable to bring on a bout of armchair apoplexy. We saw clip after clip of impatient motorists trying to overtake and forcing other road-users to slam on the brakes or swerve onto the verge. All too often, the video snippet ended with an almighty bang and a blackout.

It was proof that stress can affect an ordinary, sane human being’s judgment so badly that a gory death seems like a better option than sitting for another ten seconds in a traffic jam.

This cheap but engaging video compilation had plenty of lighter moments — including the sight of Kent farmer Terry giving chase to his driverless tractor as it hurtled down a steep field. now Terry’s mates all sing the Benny hill theme when they see him.

And one crash was so dramatic it appeared almost staged. As a car spun off the motorway, the camera twisted round, letting us see the terrified faces of a couple who thought they were about to die. They escaped with barely a scratch.

That shot would cost millions to remake in hollywood.