It's the old who are getting the benefit of benefits Still, you can't blame them. Their programme is merely reflecting national debate, as dictated by politicians, for many of whom it is useful to give the impression that the benefits bill is largely run up by the jobless. Most politicians are reluctant to propose, say, the abolition of free TV licences, because a) it would allow their opponents to accuse them of callously attacking the old, and b) the old are more likely to vote than any other age group. A politician might argue that the old have worked hard and paid taxes all their lives, whereas the jobless haven't. A fair enough point, although it does make you wonder what happens when the jobless reach their sixties. Having spent years classed as scroungers whose benefits must be cut, do they now get classed as pensioners who have worked hard and paid taxes all their lives and whose benefits must not be touched? And we haven't even mentioned people who are in work but are so poorly paid that they get benefits too, eg Working Tax Credit. None of the above is meant as a defence of attitudes like Liam's. Liam was one of the jobless we met in the programme. In the belief that his 2:1 in Media Studies placed all but the most glamorous work beneath him, Liam insisted he couldn't take a job in a shop because of "the pride thing." For some reason the pride thing didn't stop him begging for money from his family to pay his iPhone bill. His attitude will have angered many viewers, and, as a consequence, delighted some politicians. On Horizon (Wednesday, BBC Two), Michael Mosley was examining anxiety. Dr Mosley is the man who popularised this year's most fashionable diet, the 5:2 (eat what you like five days a week, no more than 500 calories on the other two). So anxiety is probably something he knows a bit about. How, he asked anxiously, can we make ourselves less anxious? Watching him, I anxiously wondered whether becoming less anxious might actually be bad for us. Anxiety, after all, can be useful. Fear of failure, for example, can make us more likely to succeed, because the fear drives us to work harder. Then again, if we were less anxious, we wouldn't mind failure so much, or crave success so badly. Maybe I'm over-thinking this. I suppose that's anxiety for you. One thing we learnt was that baby rats that get licked a lot by their mothers suffer less stress. So now you know. If you're down in the dumps, get your mother to lick you. I suspect the biggest problem with the human mind is its habit of dwelling so much on the future and the past that the present slips by neglected. But perhaps I'd better abandon that thought there. It's making me anxious. Broadcast to mark 50 years since the first of the Moors Murders, Brady & Hindley: Possession (Thursday, ITV) featured the voice of Myra Hindley, recorded in prison. But if anything the most chilling words came from an interview with a woman who as a child had lived near Hindley and Ian Brady. And who, at the time, liked them. They used to park their car just behind our house. Used to give us sweets for cleaning the car. They treated us very nicely, I suppose. Lots of adults completely ignore children. Whereas they actually seemed as if they had time for us. So that was quite nice, really. [Brady] tended to hang around in the background a little bit. It was Myra who did all the relationship work.