review

"No other animals organise lotteries," protested a psychologist fatuously on Saturday. Incontrovertibly true, I think, though David Attenborough may yet come up with a tribe of gambling chimpanzees. But so what? Perhaps no other animals have a capacity for reverie and anticipatory fantasy. Peter Ayton's indignation at the "irrationality" of the lottery - part of Life's a Lottery (BBC2), a series of short films about the subject - failed to take account of the entirely rational decision people make when they put their money down - that a pound will buy you a great deal of evasive fantasy. That may not be very healthy, and there may be nobler ways of spending the money, as the vicar of Smethwick Old Church argued last night, but the activity is not, as such, a symptom of national derangement.

For some people the benefits are as dependable as the daily papers - the newsagent who featured in Monday night's film had seen his takings increase four or five-fold and had also found the atmosphere in his shop transformed. "It's heaven sent really," he said. I hope he doesn't find that publicising the large amounts of money to be found on his premises has less happy consequences - you couldn't help thinking, as you watched him gleefully cashing up, that young men in Balaclavas might come up with other ways to hit the jackpot.

Peter Ayton also cited American research into lottery winners, which demonstrated that large wins did not make people happier, indeed there was even some evidence that large wins meant they took less satisfaction from routine pleasures than the ordinary Joe. We aren't very far here from the consolatory myth that huge fortunes necessarily bring misery in their wake - the prevailing theme in the first of a two-parter from Network First (ITV) about the Getty family.

"A Tragedy of Riches" detailed the broken lives of Getty's progeny with a tone that occasionally bordered on gloating: "Neither guns nor money can protect her now," said the narration about Getty's granddaughter Aileen, who has developed Aids. No, you thought, riches won't cure her disease but would she actually be happier if she was on the streets and wondering where the next dollar was coming from? For every miserable millionaire there's a thousand even more wretched paupers.

Getty himself didn't appear notably unhappy, though he was clearly a driven man, pursued throughout his life by the implicit rebuke of his father's will (he only got pounds 500,000 and no control over the family business, a punishment for his taste for serial marriage). He never formed a permanent marriage, though he established a menagerie of young and beautiful women in Sutton Place, his English home, and took a perverse pleasure in their domestic squabbles for his attention. He was, in obedience to another popular myth of great wealth, extremely careful with his money. The Duke of Devonshire, a friend, recalled asking his valet what he could possibly buy the richest man in the world for his birthday. "Anything," replied the valet splendidly, pointing out that all Mr Getty's shirts were frayed and all his socks had holes in them.

When his son, Paul, came for lunch he was apparently charged pounds 9 for the pleasure and Getty calculated his non-familial hospitality with equal care - "what does it cost you per guest per weekend?" he asked a friend once, hoping to compare notes. He was less diligent about emotional expenditure, undermining his adult children and absenting himself from the younger ones. The result, hardly surprisingly, was an unhappy family whose misfortunes were assiduously publicised by journalists, happy to reassure their readers that they were better off poor. But did the money really make the misery? Surely not. The psychology made the money and the misery both.