the brilliantly leaping gazelle

This morning I woke up to the first results from the local elections and they were either very good or very bad, depending on your political allegiance. The Conservatives had their best results in over a decade, the Lib Dems did badly but nowhere near as badly as Labour whilst some in the media have judged UKIP to have been obliterated, having lost all of their seats.

Thinking about UKIP being obliterated,  I thought of last night, specifically me watching ‘The War Game’ again for the first time since I was fifteen. For those of you who don’t know what ‘The War Game ‘is, it was made by the BBC in 1965, and shows the effects on ordinary civilians of a nuclear war. Immediately banned. and never broadcast at the time and only screened over 20 years later, it nonetheless won the Academy Award for best documentary.

One of the pitfalls one exposes oneself when watching something one remembered fondly from ones youth is that it can all too often be a disappointing experience, as one is judging it with a more critical eye. Sometimes things are best enjoyed as memories.

This wasn’t one of those occasions.

Watching it again after so many years,  I was struck by the fact that not only has it stood the test of time remarkably well, but that at fifteen I thought it worth seeing in the first place. I had somehow persuaded my mum to drive quite a way me to a screening of it organised was by C.N.D in a church hall. It was almost like watching ‘A Clockwork Orange’ when it was banned. Both had achieved a near mythical status, but ‘The War Game’s shocking power came from it’s matter of fact approach.

So when Jeremy Corbyn is criticized in the press for saying that if Prime Minister he wouldn’t launch a nuclear weapons is that such a shock. I mean here’s man who when he didn’t have power saying the same thing when he does. I know I’ve got brain damage and everything, but how is that a bad thing? The press would brand him a traitor to his ideals if he suddenly recanted them and use it as evidence of his untrustworthiness. And those politicians who are lauded in the press for being somehow strong for saying they oppose his principled decision, are they not aware that in a nuclear exchange, the effects of the resulting nuclear winter, the radiation sickness affecting billions, the collapse of civil society would not differentiate between who had or hadn’t fired them?