The Greatest Story Never Told

Thanks to the miracle of Hollywood, we are all familiar with the classic tale of Ben-Hur, a stirring adventure story beloved by young and old alike. But there is another story that has been lost till now, a story of two brothers tragically separated by war. One's path would lead him to Rome, through slavery, shipwreck and treachery, to a triumphant return and reunion with his family. The other's led far across the sea, to a strange land whose peaceful inhabitants were also suffering beneath the cruel Roman yoke. This man, this hero, would unite the oppressed tribes, inspire them to break free from the shackles of tyranny, and then to forge a lasting peace throughout their land. This man would change the entire history of Western Europe, would live in legend for two thousand years, would single-handedly bring about the creation of a new kingdom, a kingdom that would rise to become a sovereign power in the world, and in its turn give birth to the greatest and most glorious nation in all of history.

This man, alone.

This man called...Art-Hur.

(Coming to a cinema near you all too soon, I fear...)

In which he realises that the bit he's got cued up in his head is in fact the next bit but one...

So, I watched the last ever episode of The West Wing a while back, just for old time's sake. I haven't been watching it for the last two and a half seasons, so I don't know what's been happening, but I felt I had to be there for the finale.

And it was pleasant enough. A nostalgic ramble down memory lane for the Bartlets, as they give place to the new guy. Even Sam showed up for a cough and a spit. Toby didn't, but I gathered there were reasons. It all went very smoothly.

But it still hurt. Because I remember when The West Wing had something to say and the guts to say it. When it wasn't afraid to say out loud that one party is better than the other, one president is better than another, and it gave reasons and drew diagrams and provided references, and it didn't pretend that everything was magically all right but it told us that everything could be genuinely all right and showed us how. So it hurt that there was really no way to tell, from the episode, what kind of president Bartlet had been, or what kind of president the new guy was going to be, or if any of these people had any kind of, you know, convictions. That that was how the people in charge wanted it.

Bartlet's America, if we had ever been allowed to see it, would have been a shining thing, a miracle of rare device, a sight to make the real so-called leaders of their country (and ours) shrivel up in shame and crawl into the smallest, deepest, darkest cave that great big wonderful lump of geography can provide and pull it in after them. But no. The real admission of failure was when CJ said something along the lines of "You did good, Mr President." It shouldn't have needed saying. Bartlet shouldn't have needed to hear it. We shouldn't have needed to hear it. And Martin Sheen's expression when she said it was an acknowledgment of that.

That's why Toby couldn't be there. More than anyone else, he was Bartlet's conscience. He had to be sidelined, because he didn't fit the bipartisan, let's-all-get-along-and-keep-our-jobs approach that was foisted on this fictional presidency by the advocates of the "real" one. I don't know what device they used to get rid of him (I know he had to be pardoned for something, but not what, and I'm really not interested) but that was a tacit admission that the soul of the West Wing had been ripped out and replaced with generic soap-opera stuff. The fact that it remained a good programme only redounds to the unending credit of the cast, the crew, and the writers. But it could have been so much more.

And in that, of course, it symbolises what it represents, and the ones who emasculated it have shot themselves in the foot yet again. We look at the West Wing, as we look at America, and what we think about, now and probably forever, is What Might Have Been.