I don't like to boast, but my tv review column has wondrous healing powers. Whenever I write about M.E. (the much-hyped disease that supposedly robs victims of the ability to walk, write, or speak), I invariably receive thousands of lengthy protest letters from sufferers, usually enclosing bulky research documents which they've photocopied down the local library, en route to the post office. A few words from me, it seems, and the sick not only take up their beds and walk - they positively jump to their word processors and fax machines. Why, ladies and gentlemen, it's a miracle.
M.E. has lately acquired its own patron saint: Saint Esther, formerly known as Our Lady Of The Root Vegetables That Look Like Willies. As The Rantzen Report (BBC1) began last night, she donned the same arch, deeply concerned expression that Janet Brown once used when impersonating Mrs Thatcher, and walked on set to the accompaniment of heavily dubbed cheers, and a portentous sig tune that might have been introducing an investigation by John Pilger. "This is a disease which is destroying the careers of thousands of people," she began (although it seems to be doing wonders for Esther's at present), "but is it a modern plague or just a malingerer's charter?" As she's recently been telling the media that her own daughter has the so-called "virus," she was never likely to give a truly impartial answer to that question but, within seconds, she'd abandoned all pretence of objectivity and was already talking about a diagnosis that the medical profession overwhelmingly rejects as though it were an established fact. Looking at the well-heeled (well-wheeled) audience, once again it occurred to me how strange that it never seems to strike, say, subsistence farmers in the poorer parts of Africa.
I had nothing but admiration for Dr Thomas Stuttaford, The Times' medical correspondent and a lone voice of sanity who was "very impressed that so many sufferers get better when treated with anti-depressants." An excellent point that could help alleviate much needless misery, yet he was grotesquely booed and hissed by the victims, who all dismissed any possibility of a psychological explanation with arguments along the lines of "they think it's malingering, that it's just depression... but it's not." Well, I've known several depressives (a terrible psychological illness with clearly defined clinical symptoms), and I was appalled to hear depression callously equated with "malingering" by such a crassly insensitive and ill-informed group. Anyone with clinical depression would have been unable even to contemplate dragging themself into a tv studio, unlike the ME claque who enthusiastically crammed the aisles and vigorously roared approval and disapproval.
With a Rantzen show, you're never far from a darkened room and the tears of a pathetic child, and we got it all in one obscene sequence in which Esther encouraged a young girl to give in to self-pity, and likened a physiotherapist's (quite acceptable) hydrotherapy techniques to "methods used in mediaeval days to punish witches." As the unqualified ME lobby continued to berate qualified doctors for refusing to recognise their dubious ailment, I was increasingly reminded of the phenomenon known as hysterical paralysis, which Sigmund Freud diagnosed in hundreds of wealthy Viennese middle-class patients a century ago, yet which is today considered a phantom illness. Finally, the wolves turned in on the sledge, as secret cameras were used to set up a doctor who offered cures for ME, but had dared to insult "Esther Rancid... once she gets on a bandwagon, it's difficult to get her off." His analysis was spot on, but the audience ridiculed him because he'd diagnosed a fit person as an ME sufferer. Little did they realise that they were further undermining their own argument because, if one of the few doctors who believes in ME can't tell the difference between a genuine case and a fake, then that simply emphasises how spurious the whole sorry saga is.
Is ME genuine or bogus? Who knows? I'm sorry to say this but the phrase "release the studio tiger and we'll soon find out just how abled bodied they are" came to mind. But, more seriously, according to the programme's own poll, three-quarters of GPs regard it as a psychological condition, although that, of course, doesn't make it any less real to the sufferer. However, this programme wasn't driven by a genuine desire to find a cause - it was fuelled by the same malice that was once a feature of St. Esther's consumer shows, now thankfully axed. There was no desire to seek the truth, merely to belittle and indoctrinate in an ill-considered, inconsiderate, manipulative and unscrupulous manner. Indeed, I am taking the unprecedented step of sending a copy of this programme to the Director General of the BBC and to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission. I do not know what grip she has on the upper echelons at the BBC, but she seems to be holding the entire Corporation to Rantzen. She puts the network to shame.