Colm O'Regan: Across the nine Star Wars films there is a great deal of shite

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When normal life is abnormal sometimes you feel you need a prize for the smallest things. There are some weeks where I’ll make it to Thursday without having a beer, and I’ll stand listening with disappointment to the deafening silence of my neighbours not applauding me on their doorsteps.

“WHERE IS MY MEDAL?” I shout at the wall after the smallest amount of self-control.

But I don’t expect anything for my latest achievement. The Least Consequential Lockdown Project Ever. I watched the Star Wars films in chronological order.

All nine of them. The three trilogies, or ennealogy. The Prequel, the Sequel, and the Quel. Twenty-something hours, yet it feels like an achievement. I always feel left out when there is a big cultural phenomenon. It’s not that I want to contribute, I just have no way of gauging whether the issue is a Big Deal or not.

But now I’ve had my crash course. For the uninitiated, Star Wars is what’s known as a space opera. That is not to say that people are singing when they could just as easily get the message across by talking. The phrase is a play on soap opera. But in space. So try to imagine Emmerdale in space but Emmerdale with slightly fewer airborne explosions.

The nine films are about the struggle between good and evil. Or at least that’s how the good side portrays it. Obviously, the evil side doesn’t call itself evil. It is really about Law and Order.

Mark Hammill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford

In some ways, the experience is a bit like the person who read Shakespeare and said “it’s all clichés”. Because so much Star Wars-speak has leaked into the modern conversation, I now understand 47-year old men a lot more.

There is no point in trying to summarise the plot. If you don’t know what it’s about I won’t be able to inform you in a few paragraphs. And if you are a fan, my summary might make you apoplectic because I’ll have left out a crucial detail about Anakin Skywalker’s lineage that unlocks the whole story.

The main thing is though, watching it was Somewhere Else To Be for a while. When I was on the desert planet Tatooine with the Jawas, or the forest moon of Endor with the Ewoks, at no point was I thinking about people who went to court to stop a cycle lane in a pandemic or that a thumbs-up emoji made front-page news.

I never really understood the power of escapism before now. Sometimes you just need to get away.

Across the nine films, there is, of course, a great deal of shite. That’s to be expected. It follows all the rules of telly. The bad guy will frequently try and kill the disarmed and bound good guy/woman in the most complicated, risky way despite being surrounded by armed men paid to do the job. Or, despite being professional soldiers who have invaded half the planet, the bad guys seem to be unable to connect even once with a spaceship driven by a child. In some parts, I’m just too old to fall in love with it. I fast-forwarded through the middle bits of all the lightsaber fights. I feel like they made a rod to beat themselves with my having to have all crucial fights decided by a lightsaber duel and now they’re sort of compulsory. But if I was 11 I’m sure I’d love them. I’m at the age now that, when I watch fantasy, I spend far too long worrying about logistics, fuel, toilet access.

But for twenty hours across the last month, I was off on my holidays.