Ah, here I am again, in a little box on your computer. Telly Addict this week looks at Jason Isaacs’ new TV detective in Case Histories, BBC1; the quagmire reality show Our War, BBC Three; and format copycat The Restaurant Inspector, Channel Five. Well, it doesn’t. I do. I can obviously never embed it, so the link is here.
Never Knowingly Underwhelmed 
I understand where you’re coming from with the Our War thing, but I think you’re wrong. No, it’s not your war, and it’s not my war either. But it *is* our war. What’s happening is happening in our name. If it’s important that we understand what war really means, and the real reasons why it’s happening, then that’s only because it’s happening in our name. They’re not my guns; they’re not your bombs; but we both helped to buy them. And potentially we’ll both end up paying for their use. I don’t think Our War is a straightforward “our boys” type of title. I think its intent is suitably ambivalent. It’s not so much “My country right or wrong” as “My country: right or wrong?”
Not that it matters, but I just read that back and realised I’d missed out, well, the point, kind of. As far as “they” are concerned, it is “their” war. They want nothing more than for us to leave them to it. We could have stopped the Iraq war, and the rest. We didn’t because the campaign didn’t harness the power of opposition and focus it effectively. You marched. Many, many more of us would have if we could have. Either way it didn’t work. So then what? So then it’s their war? Because you marched and they didn’t listen? A government – a political party – enitirely reliant on us for power? There was a huge political movement there, but the tragedy was that it had no effective leadership. To acknowledge that that failure makes the war “ours” as much as it is “theirs” is surely an important step in stopping the next one (whoops, I mean the one after that).