Day 356: Fix you

I’ve been watching Bodyguard. Everyone was talking about Bodyguard last year, you couldn’t turn on a radio - which happened a lot when I was doing man work with Steve - without some twat banging on about Bodyguard, and how incredible it was, and how you just had to see it.

Well bugger that, I thought. I wouldn’t watch it. Not with all those people recommending it. People like Coldplay, and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people.

But then one night I was sat in bed, and I’d done all my chores, and I had nothing better to do than think about how weird it is to have a skeleton, and how I wasn’t alive for all of eternity before I was born, and that my brain is just some impersonal lump of matter to you, just part of the vast Other of the world, like traffic cones and Domino’s boxes and Cher CDs, but in here, to me, it’s the very central wellspring of the universe, and it’s your brain, out there, that is just some lumpy tangle of whateverness.

And I didn’t like thinking about any of this at all, so I opened my Chromebook and searched on Netflix for something loud and exciting to watch to distract me from the existential dread that seeps in whenever it’s quiet, and I stumbled across Bodyguard.

And I tell you what, they may have made a mistake with Chris Martin - and to a lesser extent Hitler - but the people were bang on the money about Bodyguard.

It’s fabulous. It’s ever so thrilling. It’s like 24, but greyer, and instead of Jack Bauer you get Robb Stark from Game of Thrones, and he’s got PTSD.

It’s, OK, a little dumb. But not as dumb as I’m making it sound. It may be manipulative of plot, but not of emotion. It’s sensitive and nuanced, and Richard Madden, aka poor old Robb Stark, is spectacular, the perfectly damaged hero, so very full of humanity when he’s talking to a scared potential suicide bomber in the opening episode, so very capable in combat situations, so very flawed the rest of the time. And those moments of action are utterly gripping, and really, you just really do really just have to see it.

There you are. I’m one of you now. Throw the Sieg Heils. March in lockstep. And sing after me:

When you try your best but you don’t succeed...