Breathtaking
ITVX
ITV’s powerful, no punches-pulled three-parter about the Covid crisis was adapted from her memoir of the same name by Dr Rachel Clarke, alongside Jed (Line Of Duty) Mercurio – a former doctor himself – and doctor-turned-writer/actor Prasanna Puwanarajah (Martin Bashir in The Crown).
Interestingly, Clarke’s professional journey was in the opposite direction to that of her collaborators: she was a journalist before heading off to medical school.
Now a palliative care doctor, Clarke has 15 years of frontline service and three bestsellers under her belt, and both her skill-sets are very much in evidence here.
As seen through the eyes of Joanne Froggatt’s consultant Dr Abbey Henderson (Clarke by any other name), this view of the pandemic is claustrophobic and relentless.
A mum and wife whose home life is soon reduced to FaceTime, Henderson sees patients arriving at her hospital with obvious Covid symptoms several weeks prior to the start of the first lockdown, on 23 March 2020.
Joanne Froggatt plays consultant Dr Abbey Henderson who sees patients arriving at her hospital with obvious Covid symptoms several weeks prior to the start of the first lockdown
Her hospital trust is ill-prepared, and the staff’s struggle to cope with an influx of patients is at odds with advice from management – following edicts from Public Health England – which seems, mostly, to be ‘keep calm and carry on’. There’s a dearth of PPE, oxygen is running out, there are insufficient ventilators and ITU beds, and staff are becoming ill.
Amid the chaos, Henderson takes her fears (and questions) upstairs, but when she’s rebuffed, she and her colleagues somehow keep the show on the road.
The writing is taut and pacy, and Froggatt (on-screen nearly constantly) is just phenomenal. There’s also archive news footage, clearly intended to provoke fury: Boris Johnson being blithe about shaking hands, for example, and Matt Hancock pretending to be all over everything.
Kathryn Flett says she wasn’t ready to return to the pandemic
In real life, Clarke appears to wear a blood-red rather than true-blue heart on the sleeve of her scrubs. Which means that for those viewers who suspect the pandemic would have been handled equally ineptly by a Labour government, Breathtaking’s political point-scoring may infuriate just as much as the storytelling moves them.
But there are some very memorable scenes: a doctor bringing in his own violin to play at the bedside of a dying musician, staff ‘attending’ the online funeral of a colleague, a dying husband and wife’s beds being placed next to each other… it’s all beautifully done.
And yet, at the end, I thought: who on earth would want to watch any of this? And why? Surely life in post-pandemic 2024 is tough enough without revisiting 2020?
Oddball but entertaining…
The Way
BBC iPlayer
Michael Sheen’s TV directorial debut (in which he also appears) is a three-part drama that, on the one hand, I can sum up as a dystopian thriller set in the aftermath of the collapse of the Port Talbot steelworks. On the other, it is a genre-buster that defies categorisation.
The lives of the Driscoll family – steelworker Geoff, his wife Dee, daughter Thea (a policewoman with a four-year-old son) and drug-using son Owen – are turned upside down when riots engulf their home town after management seems to shut down the steel plant.
Simon The Prophet is played by Jonathan Nefydd (right) while a medieval monk dressed in a red robe also turns up
In search of a new life, they aim to cross the border, evading a sinister Wagner Group-style security firm headed by the dreaded ‘Welsh Catcher’.
Sheen co-created The Way with documentary maker Adam Curtis, whose input – jump-cut news footage and gloomy electronic score – is evident.
Comedy collides with none-too-subtle political points about refugees and an ending suffused with Welsh mythology (Simon The Prophet played by Jonathan Nefydd and a medieval monk).
The oddball result is unpredictable, although thanks to a cracking cast, very entertaining.
Stacey’s a good sort
Stacey Solomon (pictured) is back to help people de-clutter their homes in the new series of Sort Your Life Out, available on BBC iPlayer
The first in a new series of Stacey Solomon’s Sort Your Life Out (BBC iPlayer) – in which de-cluttering comes with tears and hugs – saw Craig struggling to maintain a happy home for his two little daughters, whose mum died four years ago.
Besieged by grief and a houseful of stuff, resonating with memories of how life was (and should be), the journey towards the stylish, tranquil haven they deserved was genuinely heartwarming.
If, like me, you’re hankering for spring, I recommend a dose of TV vitamin D – aka Monty Don’s Spanish Gardens (BBC iPlayer).
In the first episode our genial host explored the Spanish heartland often overlooked by coast-hugging Brits, from the awe-inspiring scale of the Escorial palace complex to the intimacy of private gardens, via public spaces such as Madrid’s Paseo del Prado (Europe’s first tree-lined urban promenade). I’m certain the next two episodes will inch us a little closer to the sun.
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