Here in the sticks, the continuation of lockdown is inducing ever more grandiose and recherché forms of fantasy: now, I fancy myself to have something of Joan Didion and Patti Smith about me as I sit and watch the television in the evenings. Sadly, the similarity is confined to what, in my childhood, was called the idiot box, but which I now regard as a portal to somewhere other than the surrounding lanes and fields. Didion, I remember, as I binge-watch episodes of dramas and comedies excavated from the past by genius cultural magpies such as archive specialists Talking Pictures, spent a whole summer watching the prisoner-of-war saga Tenko; Patti Smith is a fan of Midsomer Murders and other cosies which, while recently made, might as well be relics from a bygone age for all they seem to draw on contemporary life. It’s been an odd week to complete a rewatch of the late 1970s ITV serial Enemy at the Door, which centres on the relationships between the German forces and the people of Guernsey during the occupation of the Channel Islands in the second world war. The deranged cultural commodification of the period as it is still applied to particular national football fixtures is utterly at odds with the painstaking moral explorations of the programme, in which the line between cooperation and collaboration is constantly being tested. We are now as far away in time from its making as Enemy at the Door was from the war itself, and yet we seem to understand the past even less clearly. Over the course of 26 episodes – it was cancelled after its second series and stops abruptly, with very few storylines brought to fruition and German boots still marching through St Peter port – it portrayed a life of extreme deprivation, in which the islanders, represented by a doctor unenviably charged with liaising with the Nazis, boiled up blackberry leaves for tea, surrendered their radios, bicycles and livestock, and attempted to reconcile themselves to having been, to all intents and purposes, abandoned by the UK government. Its human interest derives from two key elements. First, there is the tension between German officers, specifically the humane, intellectual Major Richter, exceptionally played by Alfred Burke, and the ambitious, ruthless SS officer Reinicke, played by Simon Cadell, who the same year the programme finished would delight viewers as the prim head of a holiday camp in Hi-De-Hi! And then come the often tragic consequences of the islanders’ attempts at either resistance or accommodation, most notably that of the doctor’s daughter who accidentally kills a German soldier and subsequently suffers a mental breakdown. Throughout runs a single, insistent question: what does it truly mean to be at war with other human beings? But there has also been viewing pleasure in watching the slow unfolding of a story, a vital part of which are its longueurs and occasional lack of incident. It’s something that feels absent from the high-octane experience of much drama being made now, intensified by the instant reaction and hypothesising that follows on social media. It put me in mind of my reaction to the much-praised Mare of Easttown which, like many others, I golloped down week by week, avid for resolution and the meting out of redemption and punishment. It was tremendously atmospheric, with terrific performances, but at the end, I found myself sadly ambivalent, overstimulated into mild detachment; being asked to care simultaneously about murdered and imprisoned young women, errant priests, marital breakdown, parental addiction and, inexplicably, Guy Pearce, had led me to care not enough about any of them. I’m swimming against the tide, I know. I can’t even get myself that worked up about Buckells; the brief furore over the finale of Line of Duty made an impression on me more as a spectacle – the working out of our feelings of proprietorship over cultural artefacts, over the investment of our precious leisure hours at a time when it’s hard to spend them elsewhere – than as a true indicator of how much I cared about H. (Incidentally, James Nesbitt can’t be dead. He’s clearly coming back to bite you on the bum. Any fule kno that.) Meanwhile, I’m firmly resisting the slide into purely retro box set action, lest I become a nightmare nostalgist. The essentially parodic joys of Succession and the unyielding grimness of Time help. Nonetheless, I’ve allowed myself the pitch-perfect dialogue of the recently rebroadcast Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a series that also uses silence to impeccably devastating effect, but which it is almost impossible to imagine being made now. In sitcom land, I have polished off the mania and melancholy of that paean to anti-capitalism, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. I am considering drip-feeding myself episodes of the BBC’s Secret Army, again from the late 1970s, again an exposition of compromise and corruption during wartime. This is good, isn’t it, I shall say to Joan Didion, as I pass her the custard creams. Alex Clark writes for the Observer and the Guardian