Too much beefing over bullies

Where I a psychologist, and television my patient, I'd diagnose it as suffering from a classic case of split personality.

It may be sexually rampant and violent by night, but by day it's a trembling helpless victim, with its morning schedules consisting of self-obsessed talk shows in which under-achievers attribute all their earthly woes to anorexia, incest, infidelity, dust-mite allergy, bullying, mystery viruses, sickbuilding syndrome, too little parental love, too much parental love, or repressed memories of child abuse.

To test my diagnosis, I recently phoned one of these victim shows (under an assumed name) to tell them that: "I've never been able to hold down a steady job because I was abused in a past life ... you see, I was the son of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra of Russia, and one day I told Rasputin that he should henceforth refer to me as a tsardine, and he took offence, and told the royal bodyguards to packrape me, then tie me to a wooden post ready for the firing squad.

" Whereupon the production office responded by asking: "Would you be prepared to talk about this on our programme?"

Of all the perennial topics that these victim shows love to wallow in, none is more regularly given airtime than bullying.

For many adults, the abuse (real or imagined) that they suffered at school becomes a lifelong get-out-of-jail-free card to explain all subsequent failures, and according to yesterday's Britain's Secret Shame - Bullying (BBC1), the phenomenon in no longer even confined to childhood.

The millions of adults who feel pressurised at work are also victims of bullying, we were told, and so are people who have problems with their neighbours, although, for most of us, the word still specifically conjures up images of childhood intimidation in the classroom.

Indeed, I've lost count of the number of comedians I've heard saying that they only started joking around at school as a defence mechanism against bullying - in which case, many of them clearly weren't bullied nearly enough.

Despite never offering us a precise definition of what exactly constitutes bullying (after all, pressure at work or at school can be beneficial, as well as oppressive), the programme hurled wave after wave of unsourced statistics at us.

"One in four have been bullied at work in the past five years" screamed one factoid, while others told us that "bullying costs £4 million a year in lost work days" (that's about 15p per worker, which suggests it's not much of a problem), that "14 million of us suffer bullying", and that "three out of four people make up 75 per cent of the population" (okay, I lied about the last one).