Mental health merits more than a One Show approach
Can you eat your way to happiness? Well, I had a toasted cheese, pickled onion and mustard sandwich yesterday that came pretty close. My aromatic luncheon habits aside, this was among the questions posed on Trust Me I’m a Doctor: Mental Health Special (BBC Two).
This dedicated edition of the medical series found Michael Mosley introducing a tag-team of experts to answer viewers’ mental health queries. At any given time, Mosley told us, one in six Brits are affected by depression or anxiety each week, while 70million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in the UK last year – double the number a decade ago.
Some of the pop science approaches brought topics to life effectively. A lively eight-week experiment found that daily mindfulness sessions were the best stress-buster. Others demonstrated how genetics play only a minor role in mental health and that social media isn’t as harmful as many believe.
However, too many segments came to eye-rollingly common-sense conclusions. Eating healthily, sleeping well, laughing with friends, doing things you enjoy and avoiding stress are likely to benefit your mental health? Forgive me if we don’t hold the front page.
When the team did hit upon a more fertile topic, coverage was cursory and surface-skimming. At a mere four minutes, a debate about the pros and cons of taking antidepressants was frustratingly brief and a waste of the eminent participants, psychiatrists Joanna Moncrieff and Simon Wesslely. Surgeon Gabriel Weston investigated a radical immunotherapy treatment that could cure cases of schizophrenia and hold new hope for more common mental illnesses. Frustratingly, it wasn’t satisfactorily explained how.
Like their material, the reporting squad was a mixed bag. Mosley, Weston and GP Zoe Williams made engaging guides but others – jittery geneticist Giles Yeo and distractingly moustached psychiatrist Alain Gregoire – had no business presenting prime-time television. They strolled around Margate’s Dreamland funfair for no apparent reason other than to distract us from how repetitive their scripts were.
Rather than a coherent piece of factual programming, this was essentially a string of One Show segments strung together. There are plenty of worthy documentaries that can and should be made about the important issue of mental health. Unfortunately, this condescending mishmash wasn’t one of them. Sufferers deserved better.
The ageing action hero Sean Bean is enjoying a fruitful second chapter of his career, playing craggy-faced anti-heroes whose woes are written all over their care-worn features: from Game of Thrones’ Ned Stark to the troubled priest in Jimmy Mcgovern’s Broken. Now he’s returned as anguished ex-cop John Marlott in The Frankenstein
Chronicles (ITV Encore).
As the period horror-thriller began its second series, three years had passed and it was 1830. Former river policeman, military veteran and wrongly convicted murderer Marlott was chained up in Bedlam hospital’s wing for the criminally insane, a broken man haunted by disorientating visions of his dead family.
He soon escaped, a little too easily for my liking, to seek revenge on dastardly Lord Daniel Hervey (Ed Stoppard), who he suspected of being a bodysnatcher, human butcher and corpse re-animator – not to mention the man who framed him. Meanwhile, a string of grisly clergy killings were sending shockwaves around Regencyera Westminster.
This episode ticked off many of the period crime tropes familiar from such series as Taboo, Ripper Street and Peaky Blinders: dim lighting, grimy locations, tweedy styling, plentiful hats, bursts of viscerally gory violence.
A classy supporting cast hinted at intrigue to come: German aristocrat Frederick Dipple (Laurence Fox) looked villainous and widowed seamstress Esther Rose (Maeve Dermody) was a potential love interest. It’s shaping up as a battle between church and state, with Marlott somewhere in the middle.
It’s very atmospheric but The Frankenstein Chronicles is wandering a long way from its roots as a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s novel. Someone needs to stitch some body parts together or put a bolt through a lumbering green monster’s neck soon, or this series could be accused of false advertising.