Mike Leigh and Professor Richard Layard on Today
April 19th, 2008 by Steve BowbrickSimple and clever news radio from The Today Programme. Mike Leigh just made a film about happiness and Professor Richard Layard has been researching happiness for years. In fact Layard recently wrote an important report for the UK Government in which he proposed that we spend a lot more money on the kinds of psychotherapy that have been shown to produce happiness. He’s a happiness guy. So, anyway, the Today people put them together for an eight minute interview and it’s not polished or deliberate but just really interesting stuff (MP3).
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:18 am
Credit to Mike Leigh for seeing the positive aspects of human responses to adversity. But he still adheres to the ‘we are destroying the planet’ matra that firstly denies lived experience and secondly substitutes human futures with the meaningless abstraction that is ‘ the future of the planet’.
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:55 pm
I think you’re asking a lot of a fuzzy old humanist like Leigh to take on board all that hard-edged materialism, man! And what’s this about lived experience? If he’s anything he’s a student of lived experience. Although I think you’ve got a different definition of lived experience than I do…