Patrick Leigh-Pemberton: I don’t know if you’ve heard of ‘The Wire’?

I don’t know if you watch The Wire, but I am fairly certain you will have heard about it. The same goes for Game of Thrones, or Suits, or The […]


I don’t know if you watch The Wire, but I am fairly certain you will have heard about it. The same goes for Game of Thrones, or Suits, or The Lord of the Rings. Now, I have something to admit. I am an addict. I don’t ‘occasionally’ watch something. I like to think that I go about this sort of thing with an efficiency very rarely seen. I get all of the pertinent materials together, all the books, all the DVDs, and I sit down, and I immerse myself in the world that some artistic genius has created, for a week – or maybe two. For the last couple of days, I have been stuck in the streets of Baltimore, watching Jimmy Mcnulty battle the twin evils of City Hall bureaucracy and the criminals controlling the towers. Last term, I found myself roaming the land of Westeros, watching as the Starks were cruelly betrayed, before wondering whether or not Daenerys’ dragons would be as cool as I had hoped. Now this may not mean a lot to you, but I have been wondering, what is it that I hope to achieve by my involvement in these places? I wouldn’t last a day in Baltimore before “getting got”, I’d probably get fed to the wolves in Westeros, and there is very little chance I would see through Saruman’s wiles if I found myself wandering Rohan.

Compare these hypothetical situations to the one that I find myself in currently, and you will see that there is very little that might draw me to them. I spend most of my time in a small and beautiful fishing town on the east coast of Scotland. I have reasonably nice friends, and even if you don’t agree with me about their character, I am certain we can all agree that there is very little chance of them shooting, torturing, cursing or selling me. Well, in most cases, some of them probably would love the chance to do that. But they can’t, because that isn’t really on in St Andrews. It also isn’t because I feel drawn to the characters, because everyone in Game of Thrones is a conniving lying power-hungry bastard, whilst all the cops in Baltimore seem to be pretty much the same, and all the really cool people in The Lord of the Rings are either trees, or 4ft tall with hairy toes. I don’t want to be like them.

So why is it that I pack in what is a reasonably pleasant lifestyle in order to inconvenience and infuriate my flatmates by sitting in the kitchen for 6 hours at a time staring at my laptop? I don’t know. I can’t work it out. But what bothers me is that I am not the only one. I am not accusing all of you of becoming this easily drawn to something, but I can’t get my head around the fascination I feel for fantasy over fact. I also can’t get over the fact that some idiot has taken disc two of series three out of the library, but that is irrelevant. It is at this point that someone will turn round and say that I should probably spend more time studying, but this is the problem. What I study is essentially the same. Maybe no one who painted in the early 20th Century had a dragon (although it is fair to say that some of them probably dabbled in narcotics), but what I study is still immersing myself in the lives of others. I am turning into one of those people who blame their problems on the system. I have become too keen on other societies and worlds because I spend my whole time studying them. And 12th Century Scotland is about as weird as Middle Earth. I am what I am, and so I am now going to make the very spurious claim that I should be allowed to sustain my addiction to these sorts of things merely to improve my historical skills.