Larry the Downing Street cat – or, more accurately, the person who runs his 'unofficial' Twitter account – has been complaining about the annoying length of US presidential campaigns. While agreeing, I pointed out that the reason is that they made the rules back when the voting results had to be carried on horseback and a 'stump speech' was one which you made standing on a tree stump. We have moved the inaugurations up by a couple of months in acknowledgement of the fact that, even with airport delays and lost baggage, it seldom takes new officeholders a whole four months to get to Washington¹. Still, in deference to Larry and everybody else who is tired of the subject, I'm going to give it a rest and talk about why we watch tv and films. Or why I do, anyway: I don't know about the rest of you bums.

For several weeks, Elektra and I were absorbed in A Family at War, a Granada series from the early 1970s about a Liverpool family during the Second World War. We found it fascinating. It's on Amazon Prime, if you're interested. Now, warning, this is pre-CGI and pretty low-tech: when I say we were impressed, I don't mean the special effects. They represented the Sahara desert by filming on a beach at Formby. We could tell.

And yes, I could hear that the accents were approximate and uneven. I mean, it was supposed to be Liverpool – and here came Nora Batty as a floor nurse. Even I know Nora Batty belongs in Huddersfield. Give them a break. I watched Broadchurch. The only person I understood without the subtitles was David Tennant. I'm a US Southerner: the next time y'all watch some tv series set in 'the South', please keep in mind that the same thing is happening there. I will be getting whiplash from the accents going from north Florida to Arkansas and up to Kentucky in the same family.

A Family at War is a good series because of the portrayals of human beings trying to deal with uncertainty, change, and random trauma. And at that task, the writers and actors did a genius job. You didn't need to have lived through that war (I didn't), or know people who had (I did). You didn't need to be English, or ever have set foot in Liverpool (I'm not, I haven't). You could identify with the dilemmas faced by the characters: is it right to let my 17-year-old go to sea when he's on an unarmed merchantman in submarine-infested waters? Is my husband coming back? What am I and the baby supposed to do with 'missing: presumed dead'?

What are we going to do with dashing David the deadbeat dad? I spent half the series hoping the Germans would shoot him down. Warning: you don't always get what you want in that series. It forces us to look at the rain – and the bombs – falling on the just and the unjust alike. I suspect that in 1970 it was intended to offer an antidote to the usual propaganda line about 'keep calm and carry on', etc.

I found A Family at War a good exercise in empathy. It lets you look at someone else's situation and understand what it would have been like. The best bit, though, was after the war, when Edwin, the father, travelled to Germany to find out why one of his sons had been killed in an explosion while trying to help some refugee kids. He, too, experienced a moment of empathy that was worth the whole exercise.

When we'd watched the whole series, I was a bit at sea, looking for something new to watch. A lot of the new series and films were disappointing: nothing but shiny superheroes and niche interests and such. Don't get me wrong: I like a lot of modern series. Lucifer and iZombie are witty and fun. Breaking Bad is a tour de force. Mike Flanagan's horror series make you think. But we stumbled on something called Dark Winds and I had to turn it off. Flat acting and no attempt to draw the audience in. No empathy at all. Maybe I didn't give it long enough, but the first half-hour was pretty awful.

We ended up watching First Man, a film about Neil Armstrong. Now that is a cinematic exercise in empathy. The camera stays close to Armstrong. We find ourselves in weird places: inside airplanes, inside spaceships. Airplanes that are crashing. Spaceships that are tumbling in orbit. Finally, we find ourselves stepping out of a spaceship and onto the surface of an alien world. What a view.

Telling a story about a man as unforthcoming as Neil Armstrong is a challenge. Ryan Gosling does an impressive job. I swear he can tell whole stories with his eyes alone. This is a guy who, when asked how he felt when he heard he was going to be the first man on the moon, replied, 'I was pleased.' When asked what he would like to take with him, he said, 'More fuel.' It's hard to get inside the heads of the terminally laconic. But when the movie ended, I felt like I'd just spent more than two hours seeing through that man's eyes.

That's what I mean about empathy. It's good exercise for our minds and hearts as we fumble around trying to find each other in the dark of our experiences and emotions. A good story will take us out of ourselves and into someone else's space. That space could be a bomb shelter or a lunar crater. I recommend it as a leisure activity.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

16.09.24 Front Page

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