Panicology by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Author:Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141912653
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

Games of Chance

‘Pole “too dangerous” for firemen’ Daily Telegraph

All workplaces have their hazards, television studios no less than many others, even if it is building sites, foundries, sawmills and kitchens that first spring to mind in this connection. Nevertheless it must have come as a shock to his fans when the Daily Telegraph broke the story that Noel Edmonds, a former radio disc jockey and television host tolerated by millions, was suffering from a repetitive strain injury (RSI). ‘Raw deal! Noel Edmonds injures his elbow lifting the telephone,’ the headline ran. Edmonds claimed he had contracted the injury from lifting an old-fashioned telephone used as a prop on his successful television show Deal or No Deal. The show draws out to inordinate length a string of blind guesses ‘contestants’ must make to come away with a sum of money that may be one penny or £250,000 depending on the breaks. No skill is involved and the whole charade could be accomplished in moments without altering the probabilities or the outcome. But that’s hardly the point. Matters are complicated by telephone interventions at various times from a ‘banker’, who offers the contestants the chance to cut and run for some amount less than the remaining stake. This happens a dozen or so times during the course of the forty-five-minute show.

So Edmonds was suffering from RSI due to lifting a telephone handset weighing perhaps half a kilogram every few minutes for half an hour or so. What are we to make of this? Should we sympathize with the £3 million-a-year presenter? Was he a genuine victim of RSI? Or was he just making a name for himself as the world’s best-paid malingerer? Perhaps it was simply a bad case of inverted snobbery. For, as Edmonds confided to the newspapers, ‘After 40 years in entertainment, I can at last boast that I have suffered an industrial injury.’

The suffering star took advice from an orthopaedic consultant – a consultant with enough time between appointments, apparently, to be a ‘huge fan’ of the daily afternoon show. He was given steroids and told to modify his hand action, which is standard treatment for the real thing.

RSI is not a condition in itself, but a catch-all term describing carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis and other conditions where a repetitive action leads to cumulative physical damage to nerves, tendons, muscles or bones, usually in the upper limbs or back. Because pain is only felt gradually and there is often no visible injury, the condition can be relatively serious by the time it is recognized and require prolonged treatment. The same factors also make it easy to doubt the reality of the condition – a doubt understandably reinforced when a miraculous cure is sometimes effected by nothing more than an employer’s financial settlement. Typical sufferers are not television presenters but workers at the other end of the wage scale, such as hairdressers and people processing cheques. In the United States, RSI costs companies more than $20 billion in compensation claims

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