The BBC's new therapy show left me with a full-body cringe

New Statesman​

14-05-2025

Photo by BBC/Twenty Twenty Productions
Right now, the BBC is asking us licence-fee payers to tell the organisation what we want it to be, an exercise it is trialling on screen as a mock TV quiz show, except there are 'no wrong answers'. It probably goes without saying that I won't be participating in this nonsense myself. As if they're going to give in to my requests for a 12-part adaptation of George Gissing's novel New Grub Street and a 360-degree rethink of Newsnight's rubbish new incarnation! But if I was to respond this very moment, I would first demand that no one would ever again be allowed to commission a series as poor and as dubious as Change Your Mind, Change Your Life with Matt and Emma Willis.
You may have seen the trailers for this too: a show that makes therapy seem vaguely like an interior-design makeover, all cushions and pot plants and easy remedies. I'll admit that I had to Google its presenters, not so much because I didn't know that Matt Willis was in the band Busted and his wife, Emma, used to present Celebrity Big Brother – though I guess I was a bit hazy – but because I couldn't for the life of me work out why they'd got this gig. Was it, perhaps, an elimination show, the last patient to sob broken-heartedly the first out of the door? But, no. It seems that Matt and Emma are merely big fans of therapy. The things it can do! 'You're not stuck with the brain you've got,' says Emma at one point, an announcement that will come as major news to the nation's transplant surgeons.
It works like this: patients new to therapy are matched to various species of shrink and we watch their encounters over the course of three sessions – though not full ones. We get about five minutes of each, and they always come with some kind of magical breakthrough, causal dots having been joined as easily as ABC. In this take on therapy, you see, no one ever lies. They're neither avoidant nor repressed. Argument, even hesitation, is unknown to them, even in the face of the very worst kind of Hallmark-card truism. And guess what? So far – look, I watched as much as my full-body cringe would allow – there have been no failures. Magic wands all round!
The patients, however, are not the problem with this show. Even if I can't understand why they want to talk of private feelings on television, I'm sympathetic to their feelings of failure, anxiety and loneliness. One of them suffers from a fear of driving, a phobia from which I suffered myself 20 years ago (I cured it by hiring a former copper, experienced in car-chase situations, to take me out on the road). No, the problem – and it's a grave one – lies on the other side. What kind of therapy do these shrinks practise, and what qualifications do they have? We're never told. I recognised one, the ubiquitous Julia Samuel, a psychotherapist best known for her work around bereavement and a godmother to Prince George, and wondered why on Earth she'd agreed to appear. I can only guess that the justification is, as ever, one of duty, that the uptight people of Britain really must learn that it's good to talk.
As for the others, how dismaying they are; how embarrassingly inarticulate and cliché-bound. Even in the hands of a highly intelligent and skilled practitioner, the thinking behind therapy can sound specious, but here it's as if they're reading at random from Eckhart 'The Power of Now' Tolle (in case you don't know, Tolle is a German, Oprah Winfrey-endorsed bestselling author of guides to 'inner transformation'). Professor Steve Peters, a consultant psychiatrist who specialises in sport, tells his patient to be 'in the moment'. Dr Fatoumata Jatta, a clinical psychologist and transformational life coach, tells hers to try to have a 'better relationship with herself' (and also to take up roller-skating again, which she loved as a child). Owen O'Kane, a psychotherapist specialising in depression and anxiety, tells his poor poppet that he senses (based on no evidence that I could see) her 'residual sadness'. He also asks her – ugh – if she wants a hug. What's that? Ah, you want to know what Matt and Emma do. In the end, it comes down to a bit of minor encouragement from the sidelines. It's pitiable, but I guess they're some BBC bigwig's idea of relatable.
Change Your Mind, Change Your Life
BBC One
[See also: Portrait of an 18th-century It girl]
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