The way we live now You know the drill...

Does looking after our teeth really have to be so difficult – and so expensive? Old hand Christopher Howse and young gun Guy Kelly consider why dentistry is such a pain

This column is suitable for dentalphobes. I know because I am one, so I won’t list any horrors here. Since we hate going to the dentist, it’s strange we put so much effort and money into finding one. In large parts of the country, an NHS dentist has not been spotted for years. Their empty nests are sometimes found, but no breeding pairs enliven the air with their piercing, drill-like calls.

Seeing a private dentist is like taking a taxi to an airport and asking him to wait until you return from holiday. The bill mounts up.

The funny thing is that dentists were ever thought funny. Humorous postcards and cartoons often featured people with swollen faces. The dentist’s chair only added to the hilarity.

I realise that laughter is often unkind. When I was a child, one comic featured Colonel Blink ‘the short-sighted gink’. I wondered what a gink was. The nub of the ginkiness of the rotund, retired colonel was that his eyesight was so poor that he was always mistaking snakes for hosepipes.

As tooth trouble was even more widespread than bad eyesight, laughing at it was to mock a universal failing, like mortality. Perhaps some children’s comic featured Mourning Minnie, ‘the wee widowed hinny’, forever bursting into tears at bus stops and stumbling into open graves. In any case, now that dentistry can be painless, the humour has departed.

Painlessness should make me fearless. Fears and rationality, however, are found in the same place only by accident, like shipwreck survivors. Some may even discount rational fear, as with Malcolm Muggeridge, once universally famous for his world-weary humour as a television pundit and not famous at all as deputy editor of this paper. I found a key to his contrarian character was a refusal to have an anaesthetic at the dentist. To me that was unthinkable.

At least in the Britain of his day there was always a dentist to be had. ‘I stuffed their mouths with gold,’ was Aneurin Bevan’s explanation of how he got consultants to cooperate with the NHS in 1948. But dentists lost their gold fillings, and we have lost our dentists.

You’re unlikely to read this in The Telegraph’s shiny new health section, but teeth really are the shrieking divas of the human body. No other area demands so much specialised attention: its own little kit, to be replaced regularly; a twice-a-day pampering via a cleaning procedure we have installed in us before we can walk; braces in youth then fillings in middle age. And despite all that, we must regularly give hundreds of pounds to experts whose job it is to gaze into our gaping maws and tell us we’re not being diligent enough. We even give teeth crowns, for Pete’s sake. The last thing they need is a greater sense of majesty.

So when I saw a photograph of Kanye West’s new ‘teeth’ recently, I felt a bite of envy. ‘EXCLUSIVE,’ reported Mailonline, ‘Kanye West has teeth REMOVED and replaced with $850K TITANIUM dentures “more expensive than diamonds” – as rapper compares himself to the James Bond villain Jaws.’

In fairness, you too would compare yourself to Jaws. Soon it was clarified that Kanye had not REMOVED his teeth but had ‘fixed prosthodontics’ fitted. Attached was a photograph of West looking pleased with himself. Or at least it seemed like he was smiling. He might have just eaten a hole punch.

I understand if he did feel smug, though. I have long wondered why we don’t remove a lot of the hassle inherent to having human bodies and simply replace bits with more practical stuff. The third finger on our right hands, to cite one example: what is stopping us trading that for a spork? (Always a problem with Wolverine from X-men, incidentally: unless he was forever preparing pulled pork, how useful could those blades be?)

Anyway, I considered all of this before reading a dental expert question how Kanye might clean his new gum bling. I had assumed Cillit Bang might do the job, but no. ‘Microscopically, there will be a lot of food, bacteria and debris getting underneath the titanium, which can then cause bad breath, sensitivity, tooth decay and gum issues such as disease and infection if the titanium is there long term,’ they said. And so the divas win again. Maybe we need dentists after all.