The tears f lowed as I watched true sacrifice

RTÉ Investigates: Ireland’s Covid Battle RTÉ One, Monday/Tuesday Celebrity Masterchef BBC1, Wednesday Talking Heads BBC One, Thursday

How was lockdown for you? If I’m being honest, I enjoyed most of it. It wasn’t necessarily fun spending three months home alone, but I saw neighbours outdoors, and people were kind to me, doing my shopping, checking in on me, video calling and so on (I’m diabetic, so I wasn’t comfortable going out at all).

Early on, I used it as an opportunity to brush up on my cooking skills. I’m handy enough in the kitchen, but I got better as it all progressed, and I made a new cocktail every weekend, and played music late into the night, and basically did everything I could to make it through. When it ended last week (insofar as we all now can travel anywhere we like), I gave myself a wee pat on the back and congratulated myself for my resilience and mental strength.

What an idiot.

On RTÉ’s Ireland’s Covid Battle, we saw real resilience and strength, not my ersatz version of it. Filmed over May and June in St James’s Hospital in Dublin, it overturned everything I thought I knew about life on the healthcare frontline. Halfway through, I started crying and I didn’t stop. In fact, I haven’t cried as much since my mother died five years ago, as one by one, we watched people expend their last breaths.

One of them was Patrick Commins, who was 97 and lived in sheltered accommodation. His key worker Lisa Connolly was a saint, coming to visit him and bringing a suit he could be buried in, to give him some dignity on his final journey. The staff placed his fob watch in one hand and a fabric heart in the other, as a priest came to give him the last rites. The nurse who with him said ‘if you could ask for death, he got what he wanted. We were all with him and he was so peaceful’, and honestly it broke me, and half the nation too. I feel no shame whatever in telling you that my face was soaked with tears, both for his death and for the sheer love and dedication of those who were looking after him.

It was quite obvious that they care so much, this was a daily trauma for them too – as one said, she hated the sound of the zip on a body bag. It was absolutely wretched.

On Tuesday, the programme concentrated on those who survived, though there was one more death that pierced me. Maura Byrne lost her husband Stephen to the disease, after over 70 years of marriage. Her lament for him, etched on her face, was a howl of pain, a visceral testament to the fact that he, no more than anyone else infected with this virus, did not deserve to die this way. We have come a long way since March, yes, but left behind are shattered lives and the profound grief that comes when any life ends so cruelly. Every family involved deserves our sympathy, first and foremost, but also thanks for allowing these stories to be told. In decades to come, this will be their legacy – we will remember them, one and all.

It seems somehow trivial to move on to Celebrity Masterchef, but since food was what kept me going, I watched the first episode of the new series with relish (not actual relish, just the virtual kind). We knew boyband member Myles

Stephenson was a good cook because he looked after the food in last year’s I’m A Celebrity, but he proved he really did know how to do it properly, easily winning the challenge of working in a real kitchen serving diners in a posh restaurant. The most intriguing contestant, though, was Thomas Skinner, who hardly is a celebrity at all, given that his claim to fame was being on last year’s series of The Apprentice.

Thomas is your archetypal East End wideboy who, in another life, would have been selling china dinner services off a barrow in Portobello Road, and here he reminded me of no one more than Boris Johnson, over-promising and failing to deliver and, when challenged, trying to bluster his way out of it with a very limited amount of charm.

I do love the programme, though, because it gives you ideas, and while some of the food was overly fussy, the flavours were so vividly described, I could almost taste them. Nothing gave me more comfort over the last few months than food and now that we’re free to move around again, and even eat in restaurants, I still want to persevere with making my own, and I’ll take inspiration for that anywhere I can get it.

Finally, Kristin Scott Thomas showed up as Celia in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, in an episode called The Hand Of God. Spoiler alert, but she played a snobby antiques dealer who dismissed Sotheby’s and Christie’s dealers as barrow boys (she would have loved Thomas), and laughed at clients who pretended to be interested in one thing when they really had an eye on duping her into a bargain elsewhere.

Celia befriended old people in the hope that when they died, she would make money from their possessions, but one she particularly cultivated turned out to have a relative in Canada who inherited the lot. As a sop, this niece gave Celia a box of bric-a-brac, including a painting of a finger in an expensive frame.

A young man professed interest in a refectory table and bought the frame as an afterthought. Celia was so snobbish, she didn’t realise he was one of the very people she thought she knew. The finger was an initial sketch of the finger of God by Michelangelo, and while she sold the frame for £100, the artwork was worth millions. Her stoic determination to avoid admitting she’d been hoisted by her own petard was pathos personified. In a week of heightened emotion, I even felt sorry for her.

Celebrity Masterchef

Contestant Thomas over-promised and failed to deliver

Talking Heads

I felt sorry for Scott Thomas’s character

RTÉ Investigates: Ireland’s Covid Battle

Maura Byrne’s lament for her husband was etched on her face