There’s that thing in computing where you’re not multitasking, you’re actually task-switching. You’re just doing it so fast that it looks like you are doing two things at the same time. I am task-switching over the US Presidential election. I had a very good time this week with the debate, but I cannot shake that I had a very bad time with the last one, so I know as well as you that things can change radically and also radically quickly. Plus when there is anyone in the US, anyone at all, who will vote for Donald Trump, there isn’t any sense in the world and there is no certainty.

You’re expecting a “But” now, because you’re a reader, you’ve easily worked out where this is all canted, and I’m not about to fail you, yet I am wary, I am so very wary, of casually saying “but” and following it with something I appear to say is of equal weight.

That’s where the BBC, otherwise somewhere I am profoundly proud to have worked, gives me the odd stab in the heart. False equivalency, where the truth on one side is treated as equally as bollocks on the right is.

So let me say “But”, but let me also say that I know full well that what is on my mind is trivial.

But it is on my mind.

If you can put aside the stakes, I am shocked by how dramatic the US Presidential race is now. I don’t necessarily mean good dramatic, either, I’m thinking more bad US TV of the 1970s and 1980s.

Let me also say that there are US TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s that are extraordinary — I owe my entire career as a writer to the inspiration of “Lou Grant” (CBS 1977-1982). But I think you know the type of show I mean when I say bad US TV of the era.

It’s where there is a hero and he is a shining god. (It is always a man, too. Watch “Police Woman” now [NBC 1974-1978] and it is shocking how much of the stories are carried by all the male characters ostensibly there as support for Sergeant Pepper Anderson.)

It’s where there is a villain, too, and today we know that villains believe they are good, that they are right, but screw that, here they’re just the baddies. It’s not that they have no redeeming qualities, although they don’t. It isn’t that they lack depth and layers, although they do. They are just out and out villains. Practically cartoon bad guys.

Tell me that Donald Trump isn’t exactly that. Precisely that.

And then tell me that Kamala Harris isn’t a hero. When she was made Vice President, I assumed she’d become President but then she seemed to vanish for four years. She’s come out so strongly now, but as a UK resident I’m not someone who will be affected by her policies so I don’t really care what those are. I should care more that I know quite little about Kamala Harris, but at this remove, at this distance across the Atlantic, I can look at her and just want a hero to beat the bad guy.

I do especially cherish that a racist misogynist is being hammered by a black woman. I do think that is wonderful. I do think that is what I would want to write if I were writing the downfall of such a foul man. And I did feel absurdly proud when Harris strode over to Trump on the debate stage and introduced herself by name. How she strode into his space, how she threw him off balance immediately, and how by telling him her name she did a dozen different things including mocking his childish mispronouncing of it.

I’m not wavering from how much I liked what she did there, but if it had been the other way around, it wouldn’t have felt so good. We know this because stepping into the other person’s space is what Trump did in his debate with Hilary Clinton and it was abhorrent. In bad 1970s and 1980s US TV we are expected to be on the hero’s side and so often when you look back now, the hero isn’t just wrong, he’s offensive. (I am still thinking of KITT, the talking car in “Knight Rider”, pinching a woman’s backside.)

Context is everything, true, and in this situation with Harris, in this situation with Trump, she walks into his space and I like her for it. I wouldn’t have written that moment, because I’m not clever enough to have thought of it.

Proud, though. That’s a weird one. Enjoyed, fine. Delighted in, sure. But proud. I think I felt in that moment that Harris was representing all of us and representing us well.

But maybe it was that she representing me and us as an audience. It felt like we were watching a performance, which we were. It felt like we were watching something — in that opening moment at least — that was written and rehearsed, and we were.

It felt as if the debate and the whole Presidential was a show.

And it isn’t.

The stakes are too high for me to enjoy anything for more than an instant before I task-switch into worrying about November 5. The stakes are so very high that intellectually I can see how this all functions as a piece of drama, but I can’t allow myself to relish it the way I would in a film or a book.

But, oh, this week was a sweet moment to be on the left.