HEARTBREAK FRIDGE

As our screens once again fill with heart-rending images, we take a sensitive look at sense and sensitivity…

“To fit in with the change of events, words to had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action.”*

Thucydides, an exiled Athenian general, wrote the paragraph above two-and-half thousand years ago (...but they might have been a postscript Yesterday In Parliament)

Its translator, Rex Warner, was a novelist turned classicist who served in the Home Guard during WWII and taught Latin at a school in Morden, just a cannon-shot away from where I’m writing this.

To many of my generation, the Home Guard is broadly synonymous with the BBC TV series Dad’s Army which ran from July 1968 to November 1977.  The show regularly attracted audiences of 18,000,000 (c.f. the most-watched show of 2025, The Celebrity Traitors Finale, which hit 25 million) and is still shown internationally today.

And among those 18 million avid viewers were my parents, who as children had lived through the London Blitz.

While I was fortunate enough to skip this horrific chapter in world history, my nursery school in Fulham had looked onto a bomb-site, and my Secondary School (where I devoured Rex Warner’s Greeks and Trojans btw) was tied with St Clement Danes in The Strand, the central church for the Royal Air Force, many of whose pilots and aircrew had died defending the skies above my parents (and, by implication, the future me).

From 1968 to 1967 there were only three TV channels available in the UK (Channel 4 kicking off in 1982) which goes a long way to explaining the viewing figures of Dad’s Army, but not the nostalgia for, and comedic success of, a series set in one of the most terrifying periods of the modern era.**

Across the puddle, the TV series M*A*S*H (1972 to 1983) had an audience 105 million viewers for its Finale (out of a total US population of circa 233 million).***  The series (for anyone too young or foolhardy not to have watched it) was set among the guts and gore of the Korean War in which around 37,000 US servicemen and women were killed. Eleven hundred British military personnel were also killed in Korea, making it the deadliest conflict for UK Armed Forces since WWII. Many of the 90,000 UK troops participating were nineteen-year-olds doing their National Service, but here again I lucked out, my father being dispatched to guard the Woolwich Ferry rather than the 38^th Parallel with the less fortunate members of his REME unit.

As of early 2025, UK viewers had a choice of 480 free-to-air, free-to-view and subscription channels, with US viewers being able to flick between 3,000 and 4,000 channels. According to the latest Ofcom report (July 2025) UK news consumption among adults is split as follows:

BBC 67%

Meta 39%

Google and ITV (both 34%)

But wherever you get your overview of world events from, the impact of 24/7 rolling coverage from war-zones such as Ukraine, Gazza (and now Iran) is bound to have an impact on most of us, the question is how this might manifest itself and why?

The term ‘psychic numbing’ was first coined by Robert Jay Lifton, who worked as a US Airforce psychiatrist in Japan (see Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima) and Korea, and was later elaborated on in the seminal 1997 paper Insensitivity to the Value of Human Life: A Study of Psychophysical Numbing.****

The study opens with a quote from one Nobel Laureate: 

Albert Szent-Gyorgi: “I am deeply moved if I see one man suffering and would risk my life for him. Then I talk impersonally about the pulverisation of our big cities, with a hundred million dead. I am unable to multiply one man’s suffering by a hundred million.”

And then moves on to the work of two Nobel Laureates:

‘Kahneman and Tversky (1979) have incorporated this psychophysical principle of decreasing sensitivity into prospect theory, a descriptive theory of decision making under uncertainty. A major element of prospect theory is the value function, which relates subjective value to actual gains or losses. The function is concave for gains and convex for losses. When applied to human lives, the value function implies that the subjective value of saving a specified number of lives is greater for a smaller tragedy than a larger one.’

But can the diminution of our response to human suffering really be reduced to a simple equation? A 2020 study of War Photography***** suggests that it is a bit more complex than that:

‘In terms of engagement, this study found that a mix of empathy, compassion and helplessness left many participants discouraged from seeking further information. The data did not support the conceptualisation of compassion fatigue in which people fail to be concerned because they are desensitised (Moeller, 1999).  Most participants grew up watching war footage of Afghanistan and Iraq, yet they still reacted with empathy and compassion to the human-cost-of-war photographs. Rather, it was the ambivalent emotions they felt that led to predictions of avoidance of such media in the future. Thus, the findings give credence to the interpretation of compassion fatigue that asserts people disengage from war visuals because they experience compassion but are overcome by helplessness (Moeller, 2008).  In other words, Kennedy’s (2019) assertion that compassion works by engaging people “via affective responses to agony, yet disengages them by eliding the geopolitical realities of power and violence that underlie the horrors’ is supported.’

For me, personally, it's a bit more personal than that.  I’d been working on Miss Saigon for a few years, and had never once been troubled by the projected images of the real life Bui Doi; the children of the troops left behind when the USA was forced to withdraw from Vietnam. Even though I’d met some of the actual Bui Doi and learned first-hand of what they’d been through. But later, when I had two young children of my own, and about the same age as the ones depicted in the show, well, no power on Earth could make me look up at those faces again.

DT

6 March, 2026