The challenge for life is to find something that you enjoy doing, something that will sustain you, distract you, and delight you, when all else fails. I can't really believe in a God that can suddenly and haphazardly intervene during one moment of history, causing air crashes, genocide and famine. [3]

He first dabbled with show business while still at school, earning five shillings a week as drummer to a female pianist at the Leeds Mecca. During the second world war, he hoped to join the RAF, but instead found himself sent down the coalmines under the Emergency Powers Act – a Bevin boy. But it is as a raiser of cash for charity that he will be remembered. His efforts won him a broad spectrum of admirers from royalty, show business and politics, and recognition in the shape of an OBE (1971), a knighthood (1990) and even a knighthood from the papacy (1982). Bad things do happen. There is no getting away from that. Sometimes my very good friend Paul Merton gets more laughs than me on Just a Minute. But we have to learn to cope with disappointment and move on if we are to find inner happiness. To do that we have to learn these seven simple rules that were handed down to me by my very good friend Tony Blair. The other day, I happened to be with the singer Rod Stewart, when he was given a model train as a present. Model railways are Rod’s passion. To see his happy face light up with delight as he opened his present was positively heartwarming. Listen: Brendan Kelly and Muiris Houston talk Psychiatrist in the Chair on the Brendan O'Connor ShowAnd, finally, if you want to be happy… Be Happy. Act it, play the part, put on a happy face. Start thinking diff erently. ‘Choose to be optimistic,’ says the Dalai Lama. ‘It feels better.’ He makes it very clear he always lived a solitary life and is not interested in friendship…Clare’s conclusion is that this is a man who has profound psychological problems.” The interview appears in a book by BBC Radio 4 psychiatrist, the late Anthony Clare, which brings together a number of interviews from the radio series In The Psychiatrists Chair. They claim it was his ‘single greatest contribution to psychiatry’ and it became an instant classic. In it, Clare argued that it was unhelpful to conceptualise normality and madness as dichotomous, and better to see them as points on a continuum. Over four decades later, the authors declare that it still merits and rewards close reading. And so to In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, which ran on BBC Radio 4 from 1982 to 2001.

From the information provided by the hundreds of people who have come forward to Operation Yewtree, police and the NSPCC have concluded that Jimmy Savile was one of the UK’s most prolific known sexual predators. Indeed the formal recording of allegations of crime on this scale is, to the best of our knowledge, unprecedented in the UK.” So I am all terribly logical which is actually bad news for you guys, because common sense and logic don’t leave you with a lot to find out.” The photographs taken of the Queen at Royal Ascot as her horse won the Gold Cup showed a picture of pure happiness. His obsession with making money is questioned, with Savile revealing an odd motive for always keeping a new car in the driveway. Knowing what we now know, it seems he prepared to be ready to go on the run.He explained that Savile believed he was above the law and kept himself detached from other people who could provide balance to his character. I once asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu: ‘Will there be people in Heaven?’ He opened his eyes wide, looked directly at me and smiled happily. ‘Oh, yes. Heaven is community. A solitary human being is a contradiction.

Assess exactly how you spend your time and how it makes you feel. Audit your happiness and then, if you fancy living longer, do what you can actively to increase the happiness quotient in your life.  His areas of research were practical, often exploring the relationship between psychiatry and society. He did a study showing that the rate of schizophrenia in Irish emigrants in London was no worse than in the indigenous population, thereby dispelling the myth of the mad Irish. The key task now, Clare argued, was not revealing the repressed and the forgotten, but processing and understanding what was already known. The purpose of the new series, he said, was to cast light on the sources of each guest’s life and values. What motivates them? What sustains them through difficulties and crises? What fuels the notions of excellence that so many high- achievers appear to demonstrate? Above all, why do they do what they do? And how? A few years ago, I challenged the eminent psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare to conjure up the secrets of happiness; we treated the exercise as a game. Our conclusions form the basis of my new book.

Podcast

Years later, in 1996, in an introduction to an interview with Laing in the first collection of In the Psychiatrist's Chair, Clare wrote, "We are still too close to R.D. Laing's death to be able fully to assess the ultimate worth and impact of his views. His was a powerful voice in the movement to demystify mental illness and he undoubtedly contributed to the process whereby psychiatry moved out of the large, isolated, grim mental hospitals into acute units attached to general hospitals and into the community . . . He influenced a whole generation of young men and women in their choice of psychiatry as a career." Clare once attributed his own choice of career to Laing's influence. This, for me, is the most challenging of the seven secrets. Instinctively, I do resist change. I am a conservative Conservative. On the whole I like things as they are. Or, better still, I like them as they were. Seeking happiness in transient highs is a recipe for unhappiness, as my very good friend Delia Smith once pointed out to me. But it was only when I sat down with my very good friend Dr Anthony Clare, the eminent popular radio psychiatrist, that I truly understood what this meant. "The ting is this, Goyles," he said, in his lilting Irish brogue that I can still hear as clearly today as I did 10 years ago. "All you really need to remember is that there is no higher form of love than being in love with the sound of your own voice." I've never forgotten that. His two chapters on "schizophrenia" are still worth reading now for anyone trying to understand what it is and how it comes about. In an admirable spirit of open inquiry, Clare sympathetically presented views on the matter that he disagreed with. His own view, which still holds true, is that Anthony Ward Clare (24 December 1942 – 28 October 2007) was an Irish psychiatrist and a presenter of radio and television programmes. He was the presenter of the radio series In the Psychiatrist's Chair, an interview and discussion show, which aired on BBC Radio 4.