Feel good for your age? Sorry, but Auntie Beeb’s got bad news
Oh, LOVELY. here’s another thing to worry about. No matter how healthy you might think you are, Auntie Beeb reckons you could be teetering on your perch, ready to drop.
How To Stay Young (BBC1) might as well have been called It’s Later Than You Think, or Don’t Start Reading Any Long Books.
Dr Chris van Tulleken says that two-thirds of us are older on the inside, thanks to clogged arteries and failing organs. Regardless of the date in your passport, you could be 20 years more elderly than you ever guessed.
Take Patrick, an NhS worker who lived on a diet of fried food and chocolate. he was 51, but how To Stay Young claimed his body was 22 years older, and that internally Patrick had just celebrated his 73rd birthday.
This raises more questions than Dr Chris and co-presenter Angela Rippon were prepared to answer. For a start, is Patrick eligible for a bus pass? Does he need to reapply for his driving licence? Crucially, how much pension is he owed?
In fact, Patrick looked in pretty good shape for 51 — and if he’s actually 73, that’s astonishing. Thin and energetic, he was easily able to do press-ups, and was soon working out for ten hours a week.
Dr Chris does love his exercise routines. he met 47-year-old Jen, who survived ovarian cancer last year, and told the poor woman that she was really 71 on the inside. The main reason for this, he said, was her insomnia… and the cure for insomnia was workouts.
Jen protested that she hated exercise — so Dr Chris prescribed the most demanding regime of all: 20-minute bursts of ‘high Intensity Interval Training’ or hIITs. Ouch.
Most of his advice was sensible: eat oats for breakfast to reduce cholesterol, replace salty snacks with walnuts, try the Mediterranean diet of avocados and houmous instead of bacon and black pudding. When you’re trying to go to sleep, don’t sit up watching TV and fiddling with your phone. Reduce your stress levels by practising mindfulness.
All of this was fine, but it was padded out with bucketloads of statistics and graphs. Only a chartered accountant with high blood pressure could really enjoy this show.
Still, it soon had the patients growing younger. That poses a whole new set of conundrums. If you’re 30 but your internal age is 15, are you still entitled to vote?
That’s not half as silly as the challenges set for five comedians on Taskmaster (Dave), the best panel gameshow currently on the telly.
What began as an oddball idea at the Edinburgh Fringe has grown in confidence on screen, as its inventor Alex horne discovered that almost anything is funny once it becomes a contest.
The simpler the instructions, the more manic the competition between the five players, who this series include Vic Reeves’s sidekick Bob Mortimer, and Sally Phillips from Miranda.
Throw a basketball through a hoop without touching it with your hands… flick fruit into a glass… paddle a boat without any paddles…
Greg Davies, the host handing out these challenges, takes a sadistic delight in seeing the comics humiliate themselves.
But it is his praise when they do well that really galvanises them. It’s a primal urge — even urbane and intelligent chaps such as hugh Dennis and Richard Osman have been reduced to behaving like needy children, desperate for approval, in previous series.
Grown men and women will do anything for a pat on the head, it seems. If you like your slapstick with a dash of cruelty, this is irresistible.
TRAFFIC JAMS OF THE NIGHT: Congestion in Moscow is so bad that car drivers have even started using the pavements, Anita Rani learned in World’s Busiest Cities (BBC2). But that won’t happen here — the cyclists got there first.