Separating the Men from the Boys

[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

You can learn a lot about men from the BBC's iPlayer.  At the blokey end of the spectrum, occupied by the two triumvirates of Top Gear and Three Men in Some Sort of Boat, full of competitive bragging mine's bigger than yours, general all round camaraderie full of male bonding, and one-for-all and all-for-me stuff, these programmes are all about the presenters, their gang and their view of the world.

When you're stuffed to the gunwales with male ego, testosterone, petrol and hot air, you can always settle back into the comfort of your armchair to be encouraged to get out of your comfort zone by the Hairy Bikers and the Baroque Barolo presenters of Sicily Unpacked.  These pairs would be cool to meet because you get the feeling they'd be interested not in telling you how brilliant they are, but how brilliant where you are is and how you're just going to love that special ice-cream they discovered.

Finally we reach the solitary presenter, usually a rent-a-don who deals with his loneliness with Adobe After Effects and finding some old relic, living or not, to interview or eulogise about. Rarely does any earth shattering conclusion emerge, but somehow the worthiness of one man and his doctorate gives the illusion of an hour well spent. Wow, it gives you all the ammo to out-Clarkson Clarkson with big hitting swagger - if only you had his chutzpah. 

Freddie Flintoff's Hidden Side of Sport was billed as one of these wallpaper programmes of meeting up with some mates to pontificate. We could have been forgiven for assuming it would be to talk about themselves, their outstanding achievements and my showcase is bigger than yours. Freddie was off to chat with the giant egos of multiple World Champions.

Looking back to now from the future we may well say that Freddie's programme was the starting line for a new generation of men and a whole new ball game for programmes about them. This was not about ego, opinion, lightweight education and amusement, nor emotion. This was about the rawest emotion of them all: depression.

The underlying theme was eye-opening for many: you could be at the peak of your chosen sport from boxing, cricket, football and snooker, representing your own country no less and still be floored, just like the next man, with near crippling depression. This was the coming out programme taking depression from being spelt P45.

This was probably one of the best bits of television I've watched for a long time. Freddie was thoughtful, low budget, discreet, comforting and accessible. He had been, after all, the most macho of them, the type of guy that I'm guessing Clarkson and his petrol-head chums who play Sunday village celebrity cricket would most like to be like (or bowl out). He raised questions, accepted responsibility and was very matter-of-fact manly about it. It wasn't touchy-feely, nor voyeuristic. It was human with huge doses of a commodity we rarely see on the box: humility.

The obvious conclusion to draw from Freddie's observations was that as long as what you're looking for is outside you then you're never going to find health and happiness, contentment and satisfaction. That comes from within. How do you find that? That's the question on the back of which is an answer with far more consequence than which car, holiday, dinner or wife to choose.

When I first read that Yogi Bhajan, a few decades ago, foresaw a time when the newspapers' court pages went births, deaths, marriages, suicides, and fratricides, I could barely comprehend it. However, the news over the so-called holiday season is already beginning to look like that with a handful of families murdered by someone so depressed that they wanted to destroy not only themselves but also those around them.

Handling depression is one of the great dilemmas our society faces now, with its fellow presenters of obesity and diabetes. Depression is a lack of inspiration, a lack of oxygen and red blood cells, and a lack of feeling you belong to something worthwhile. All of these have solutions which don't need pills to fix. I very much hope that the BBC in its wisdom recognises that it has a duty to explore this further and offer up solutions other than just that found by the snooker player who feels he's confined in the purgatory of taking The Pills for the rest of his life.

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