Watching the footage on television, Chris Lloyd gives his views on the multi-media spectacle of war.

WHEN it came, it was indeed shocking and - rather than awesome - quite awful.

Half-a-world away, viewers were thrown back into their seats when the television screen in front of them exploded as the Americans' "shock and awe" campaign was unleashed on the poor, poor people of Baghdad.

The missiles burned in blinding white, dazzling the camera's eye, and subsided into angry reds and purples, and burning oranges. Huge plumes of smoke clouded into the night sky and were backlit like lightning as the next cruise missile struck home. There were mushroom clouds rolling like thunder into the air, and litter like 9/11 rained out of them.

It was extraordinary, a lifetime of November 5s rolled into a single 20-minute display that was screened live in your living room at tea-time.

There were ooohs and aaahs and, when the show-stopping big ones went off, a couple of Jeezs. Such was the percussive force of the explosions, you would swear you could feel the ground move under your feet, and instinctively you threw yourself back into your seat.

But no. You had to be in Baghdad to feel the full force.

Instead, people in the North-East of England snuggled down with their comfy cushions for an evening's relaxation, or sank an after-work pint in the pub, where the news channel for once took precedence over the sport.

It was dreadfully fascinating, horribly compelling - you could not tear your eyes away from it.

The commentator on Sky promised that he would stay silent and allow the viewers "to absorb the sights and sounds of war". It was as if we had to savour them, roll them round in our mouths like a fine wine, and treasure their memory like the view from the hotel balcony on the last night of a foreign holiday.

But perhaps he was right. Perhaps it needed to be absorbed, so that you could pick up every detail: the palm trees bouncing around as if in a hurricane; the lights left on in the ten-storey tower block beside a raging inferno, and the occasional car scurrying around the streets as the driver fled in fear.

And to see the Iraqis' trivial response. They must have thought themselves so brave, firing their anti-aircraft bullets into the sky, defiantly standing up to the Great Satan by trying to bring down his planes. But we in Darlington could see how puny and pathetic their little popguns were. Like cheap supermarket rockets, they twinkled like stars momentarily before drooping in disappointment and fading from view. No damage done to the B-52s that were 1,000 miles away by then.

Vietnam is said to have been the first televisual war, but it was in black and white. The Gulf War of 1991 showed the live possibilities, but it was in night-sight green with flashes of light chasing each other around the screen.

The shock and awe war of 2003 is in full technicolour, pinks and yellows setting off the browns and greys of the smoke and the sky. It is terrifyingly beautiful; it is in our living rooms but distant.

And the only colour we cannot see is the close-up red of the dead - but come the next war they will probably find a way of bringing that into our living rooms as well.

22/03/2003