Known primarily for the writer Aaron Sorkin’s “walk and talk” dialogue, which sent its seductive protagonists twisting and turning down the corridors of the White House while jabbering at high speed, this brilliant series turned speech into movement and was – while Sorkin worked on it until series four – a masterclass for would-be scriptwriters trying to capture the flavour of the modern world.
With George “Dubbya” Bush occupying the Oval Office of the real universe, it was a profound relief to escape to Martin Sheen’s alternative “Bartlet version”, in which the president was a Democrat who quoted Shakespeare and Plutarch, who battled silently with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and who had assembled a group of staffers vying with each other only for the intensity of their commitment to their chief and to Project USA, for the number of lattes they could consume in a single day and for their linguistic acrobatics.
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