That's men for you - Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health: Back in the days when Basil Fawlty mismanaged Fawlty Towers, his displays of anger were portrayed as ridiculous. When he verbally and physically abused his unfortunate Spanish waiter, we laughed - but we laughed at Basil.
Would his anger be portrayed in such a negative light if Fawlty Towers was written today?
TV chef Gordon Ramsay is feted and famous for his angry outbursts. I shudder to think of how many budding Little Caesars are eagerly absorbing Gordon's management style.
And yet, despite the current glorification of anger, I expect most of us remember angry outbursts that we regret.
Excessive expressions of anger are bad for relationships, are a source of bullying in the workplace and are damaging for people's health.
A recently completed study of 670 military veterans in the United States, for example, found that over an eight-year period, the men with the highest levels of hostility and anger suffered quicker declines in their lung functioning than their less-angry colleagues.
The decline was greatest in the angriest men.
It would take further research to clarify whether the hostility caused the decline in lung function or whether it was the other way around.
But this and other links between anger and ill health suggests that it is not as good as some angry people make it out to be.
Indeed, there is reason to believe that outbursts simply stir up the anger and keep it simmering instead of getting rid of it.
If you have something to say to a partner or colleague, it is better to say it clearly and without harshness than to shout abuse at them.
Once you accept that excessive expressions of anger create more problems than they solve in both home and work relationships and in your health, you are on your way to doing something about it.
But what? I think the first thing that needs to be done is to recognise that expressions of anger often follow a period of angry thinking. You might be thinking angry thoughts about something that happened 30 years ago or about something you heard on the radio 30 seconds ago.
Either way, if your thoughts are angry, you are far more likely to lash out at the people around you. So be vigilant about the sort of thinking that goes on in your head. Once you recognise angry thoughts, get yourself out of your head and into the present moment by observing what is happening around you - what you are hearing and seeing.
The second thing that may help is to become familiar with a phrase that is used by members of the international self-help organisation, Recovery Inc - people do things that annoy me, not to annoy me.
We get far more angry about, say, somebody cutting in front of us in traffic or somebody not coming over quickly enough to serve us in the shop if we think they are actually setting out to annoy us. It is the assumption that that person is acting intentionally that ramps up the anger.
There is no denying that the person is behaving annoyingly - but annoying you in particular is probably the furthest thing from their minds. Try it out: people do things that annoy me, not to annoy me.
If your angry outbursts come so fast, you don't even have the time to do what is outlined here, try to spot the physical changes that tell you an outburst is on the way. You might notice a rise in your body temperature, for example, or a tension in your head or chest.
By becoming aware of these physical signals, you can buy time to apply these methods.
They are similar to the traditional piece of advice to count to 10 before responding to provocation. It is as good a piece of advice today as it ever was.
I wish Gordon Ramsay and some of the twits learning all the wrong lessons from him would apply it.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.