Tony Earnshaw: No Oscars and no happy ending when real life becomes a cruel drama

For a moment, I seemed to slip outside myself and watched the scene unfold. Just like a movie. Except this wasn't a movie. It was real life. My dad's life.

Such scenes on film are played with great intensity accompanied by stirring music designed to rouse the emotions. Movie stars emote wildly, producers rub their hands together gleefully and everyone casts a sideways glance toward the Oscars.

In real life, the scene plays out in a nondescript office overlooking a car park. There are self-explanatory pictures on a computer screen. Three people discuss options and timescales in the face of hard decisions. But there is no music.

Driving home from what was a shattering experience, albeit one drenched in ordinariness, the conversation touched upon everything but the matter at hand.

Real life is like that. The movies take the ordinary and give it a patina of fantasy.

In movieland, stark choices are given added drama.

The doctor and his artificially sympathetic demeanour is played by someone like Tom Hanks. The patient might be Clint Eastwood.

"Give it to me straight, doc: how much time do I have?" says Clint.

"Not much," says the medicine man with a shrug.

Thus Our Hero takes the bad tidings, squints, squares his shoulders, sticks out his chest and strides off to face an uncertain future.

Naturally, some hack Hollywood scriptwriter offers up a battlefield scenario where Our Hero grapples with his condition, seeks out alternative treatments or wonder drugs and smites the canker with a

vengeance. All ends happily ever after.

I'm tempted to write a trashy screenplay to play out my wish-fulfilment on paper. I'd keep the preamble the same but the denouement would be significantly different.

I remember the Dutch actor, Rutger Hauer, commenting in an interview back in the early '90s: "Is that what you want to hear – that life

is easy? Not from me. Life is tough and hard."

Indeed it is, but, sadly, we don't have the luxury of writing our own happy endings, much as we'd like to.

Performing as an extra in a film is one thing; propping up the cast list of a painfully real drama is something else entirely.

Even if the fantasy film version does star Clint Eastwood.

When it comes to grit and true-life courage, give me my father over Clint any time.

That's a reality check. But, right now, I'd rather be living in the movies.