Band of Brothers: Can You Feel the Man-Love Tonight

A few months ago, an actor friend of Monkey's revealed he was in Band of Brothers. "Second private from the right, probably," he said. "I think I got shot. Lots of mud and running." I expressed surprise and interest, explained my love for the series and prepared to wax lyrical about my adulation. He looked bored. "Every British male actor who was under 35 was in that thing," he said. And it's true.

Leaving aside this (with all due respect to him, extremely minor spot), you have a positive galaxy of British youths who were on bearings to better things: Simon Pegg, Marc Warren, Jamie Bamber (errr...actually, scrap that. Jamie Bamber was on a bearing to Ultimate Force at the time), James McAvoy (who I swear to God I still confuse with James D'Arcy but as he has done a film with Angelina Jolie it is beside the point whether little old me gets his name right. I do know he's Mr Tumnus!), Tom Hardy (not as well known as the others, but I've seen him starring on stage twice and he's a truly talented actor) and of course Damian Lewis, whose career has recently stalled in the dull Life, but who in Band of Brothers is little short of a star, partly because he wasn't playing a pillock and therefore it was like a reinvention. There are a few other "oooh I know your face!" types also like the guy from Hotel Babylon these days, but who I know from Press Gang.

There are two things that have always predisposed me to like Band of Brothers. The first is that the titles are so long you can put on the DVD, have a shower and make a cup of tea and come back just as it gets going. I remember when it was on TV you always knew you could miss the first 10 minutes and it would still be merely a dramatic montage with stirring music. The second is that it was filmed down the road from where we briefly lived at the time and my brothers and I would spy through the fence at the site. You could see very clearly a set that at that point everyone knew was a "shelled French village" (someone must have got that from a crew member, because this description was exact amongst the kids). I think the bit of Shelled French Village I remember seeing was probably Carentan, actually, but I may be wrong about that. I also don't recall if it was Band of Brothers or one of the Bonds where they got in trouble by setting off a massive explosion without warning and the population of Hertfordshire hid under their sofas quaking while imagining battalions of Equity members storming the county with fixed bayonets.

The series follows the trials and tribulations of the hopelessly inaccurately named Easy Company of the 101st Airborne. Band of Brothers is mildly constrained by being anchored in the vague vicinity of reality, and for this reason characters die frequently and unexpectedly, so it's as well not to grow too attached to them (it is similar to The Bill in this respect). Putting names to faces is all but impossible, even after you've seen it a million times. Even differentiating the faces can be tricky, since according to the series Easy Company was little short of a beauty contest for the conventionally attractive.

Now, I don't much like action or war films. I certainly didn't like Saving Private Ryan, which is Band of Brothers' illegitimate father. So why do I not only like Band of Brothers, but have a copy of the DVD, which I treasure? It's quite simple, really. As a television series, it's close to faultless. Oh, sure, the wimmin (when they turn up) have been waiting their whole lives to lay the Americans, the Germans are aquiline and brusque, the British are bumbling idiots. Who cares? Band of Brothers conveys the war through certain eyes: one company of the US Army, and as such it tells us more than any film. You live it with them, even if (like me) you have no clue what the relative sizes of platoons, companies and battalions are.

Well, the difference is the canvas upon which it is writ. It is not like with your The X-Files or The West Wing DVDs, you can't sit there at 11 o'clock with time to watch one episode and think, "I'm going to watch that great episode where so-and-so's legs get shot off", it doesn't really work like that. Band of Brothers only works when watched as a whole, a snapshot of the war with all the inaccuracies you would expect from recalling from first hand experience, as I have forced Monkey to do this weekend. He had previously dipped in and out, and hadn't got the appeal. He gets it now.

They are of course all immensely brave, and of course to a casual British viewer with a jaded sense of humour there is occasion where this reverence for the courage of soldiers becomes pretentious. They say things like, "We're paratroopers. We're meant to be surrounded." They march purposefully into the jaws of death. But, and this is the saving grace, the series doesn't judge those who are not Thor-like gods of war. Those who aren't latter-day Alexander the Greats are treated sympathetically - men out of tune with the situation they find themselves in, but men all the same and not cowards. Equally, it doesn't shy away from the nastier sides: the men fall out with each other, they loot the Germans, they shoot unarmed scared enemy fighters, they get demoted because they drink too much, they are successfully faced-down by scary elderly German ladies. They get trashed at the Eagle's Nest. (I've been to the Eagle's Nest and climbing in Hilter's golden lift was the spookiest moment of my life).

There are also several genuinely moving moments. You feel the horror the first time Easy are confronted with tanks, and the enormous relief when Shermans turn up. I have never physically jumped at a war film until watching the barrage at Bastogne, it is impossible not to flinch. The company liberating a concentration camp, without knowing what a concentration camp is. The celebration of VE Day. The final baseball game where we learn the fate of the real characters (I love that last baseball game, so all-American, yet so many of the actors are British, I have to wonder whether they had to do a "Basics of Baseball" course).

It is magnificient television. And like most magnificient television, it has magnificiently attractive actors. One of the episodes is fantastically told through the eyes of the Company medic, inhibited but gorgeous Doc Roe, who sort of sprang into being whenever anyone howled "MEEEEDIC!" for three or four episodes , but actually turned out to have Feelings too (mostly for a pretty, doomed French nurse). And of course the mildly creepy but head-swimmingly gorgeous Lt Spiers. How about drunken but gorgeous Cpt Nixon? Let us not forget troubled but gorgeous Cpl Liebgott. It's only fair to include the awfully untalented but nevertheless gorgeous Pt Webster. And, presiding over all, gorgeous Major Winters, just busting at the seams with love for all the men, equalled only by the love returned until the whole thing became a huge love-in with everyone filled with a warm glow of loveliness that is most welcome after 10hours of purest hell.

Seriously. Make a weekend of it. If nothing else, it will remind you on Monday morning that your life could be a lot worse.