Social media is currently infested with people professing to be “empaths” who are suffering cruelly (with no apparent discount for it being remotely and, uh, imaginatively) through the crisis in Ukraine. It is sickening to watch, not least because it clothes narcissism in one of humanity’s finer qualities. The ability to put oneself in another’s shoes and stand there, looking out alertly and intelligently from that point of view, marks us out from the beasts as surely as language.
The ability to empathise on camera without appearing inauthentic and being emetic is a refinement of such a gift, and one without which many human interest programmes become unwatchable. That Your Body Uncovered With Kate Garraway (BBC Two) succeeds at all is down to her genuine interest in people and ability to say the right thing with the right degree of sentiment. The whole thing is heightened, of course, by the knowledge of what she is going through at home, caring for her husband Derek Draper. He has been incapacitated – possibly long-term – by the after-effects of Covid and, as she put it in a recent interview, she has been learning to love him in a different way.
