For a long time now, I’ve found it hard to watch The West Wing or read any of its scripts because real-life politics has seemed infinitely and painfully separated from the fictional politics in the show. It still does. But a few weeks ago, I came across a West Wing script online.

Nothing about the last few weeks has narrowed the gap between that show and this world, and this week the Conservative Party Conference here in the UK has made me scared and queasy. Yet despite this, and despite the rather more prosaic reason that I’ve read the script before, on August 22, I re-read Aaron Sorkin’s pilot script to The West Wing.

It actually hurt to read the idealism and the cleverness and the wit. But admittedly it also hurt because that script is now 24 years old. It is a quarter of a century ago, and I am therefore a quarter of a century older than I was.

I haven’t got over that. But in the weeks since, I’ve read a further 14 West Wing scripts. Season 1, episode 5, The Crackpots and These Women still irritates the kidneys out of me for its closing moments of such patronising crap toward the women characters. And season 1, episode 11, Lord John Marbury makes me want to slap people.

But Celestial Navigation (s01e15), In This White House (s02e04), and Bartlet for America (s03e09, script not online) are superb. That’s the word I wrote next to each script in the little list I keep so that I can go back to good ones. No analysis, nothing in depth, I just write “superb” or anywhere from there down to “utter shite altogether”, which even Lord John Marbury wasn’t bad enough to earn.

Although next to The State Dinner (so1e07), very unusually, I did say a little more. “Excellent. And I don’t think I will ever write for television. 468.” (It was the 468th script I’ve read this year.)

Only, I didn’t intend to talk to you about aging or my writing failings, I want to talk to you about a line from The West Wing, a famous line, which goes: “Crime. Boy, I don’t know.”

It’s said by Governor Ritchie (James Brolin) to President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) in s03e21, Posse Comitatus by Aaron Sorkin. I can’t link you directly to it because it’s not one of the half dozen online, it’s one of the sixteen or so that were published in a couple of books. You can still get this script in the second volume, which Amazon has just told me I bought on February 7, 2005. I’m not convinced I was even alive that long ago.

But anyway, “Crime. Boy, I don’t know.” There’s been a situation in the episode, there have been a lot of situations, and Bartlet the Democrat is talking about them with Ritchie, the Republican. Ritchie is the one who says this line when asked what he thinks. It’s a telling line that we recognise means Ritchie isn’t up to the job of being the next President.

So on February 7, 2005, when I first read the script, or sometime very soon after the show’s first US airing on May 2, 2002, I read or heard that line and was appropriately informed. Sorkin leaves you no question whose side you’re on — he’s very good at putting opposing sides together and not weakening whichever one he disagrees with — but here, Bartlet yes, Ritchie, no.

And to drive it home, a few minutes later Bartlet concludes the conversation and the scene with this line to Ritchie: “In the future, if you’re wondering, ‘Crime. Boy, I don’t know,’ is when I decided to kick your ass.”

February 7, 2005, that line worked and I got it as intended. May 2, 2002 or so, I got that line as intended.

But when I read it just now on October 3, 2023, not so much.

What was considered shocking back then, what was a sufficient signal to tell us this Republican is not a good choice, is nothing now.

I know that audiences bring something to any show, but this is a quarter of a century of being an audience to some truly miserable politics, it’s having been an audience to corrupt children playing at politics.

Now, even “Crime. Boy, I don’t know if I should tell you about the 91 that I’m charged with,” wouldn’t be shocking.

Shows and scripts are nothing without the writer, but the audience does bring something, I know. I just hadn’t really thought about how time brings something too.