Breathtaking

Remembering the Pandemic (and those who fought it)

In January this year, the comedian Rosie Holt did one of her brilliant fake-Tory MP sketches, in which her gormlessly wide-eyed Helen Whately-esque persona was asked by GMB’s Susanna Reid why the government hadn’t known more about the sub-postmaster scandal. In her defence, Holt’s character accused Toby Jones and ITV of failing in a ‘duty of care’ by not having made more tv dramas earlier.

It was very funny, but not as absurd as Holt made it sound. Because nowadays, it really does seem that the UK public needs even the most egregious institutional failings and social issues to be presented as tv drama before it pays any attention to them, and certainly before the government does. Once upon a time you wouldn’t necessarily have looked to ITV to do this, but now we can add the NHS drama Breathtaking to ITV’s burgeoning list of true-life dramas that transcend mere entertainment.

Adapted by Jed Mercurio from Dr Rachel Clarke’s book, this three-part drama is a powerful, hard-hitting and visceral piece of work, which depicts in graphic detail the impact of the pandemic on the NHS, while also taking aim at the governmental lying and mismanagement that made a terrible situation even worse.

Watching NHS staff desperately trying to cope with a pandemic for which the service was so ill-prepared, while facing a welter of contradictory policies from the worst government in British history, brought back memories of those first months in 2020, when the world suddenly fell apart. It already seems like decades ago since Boris Johnson initiated - as we now know through gritted teeth - the first lockdown of March 2020.

I remember very well how I stood outside my house on the first Thursday of the official beginning of the pandemic and clapped, along with most of the houses on my street, for the NHS workers who were only just beginning to bear the brunt of the Covid-19 virus. We even persuaded a singer in our neighbourhood to sing Stand By Me from her attic window to a chorus from the street below.

Few of us knew what was going on in hospitals at that time, but many of us had seen the awful images coming in from Italy and other places, and all of us understood that the same thing could happen here. These were terrifyingly novel realisations, in a post-industrial society that tends to take its security for granted, and thinks of itself as immune to the calamities that take place elsewhere in the world.

Here in the UK, death belongs mostly to the private sphere - the one thing all of us can be certain about, and yet prefer not to talk about, until we have no choice. Only occasionally are we reminded of what lies ahead, when an ambulance wails past or we watch the stately progress of a hearse slowing down traffic.

COVID-19 was different. For the first time since World War II, we faced the very real prospect of mass death. Living, as most of us do, in an urbanised world of bricks and concrete in which nature and the ‘environment’ are seen as something separate from ourselves, we were all reminded that we were in fact part of nature, at the mercy of organic processes that might or might not have originated in a wet market or a cave full of bats on the other side of the world.

Many of us felt helpless as well as vulnerable, and so we retreated into our homes in an attempt to protect ourselves from a virus that seemed to spreading everywhere instantaneously, through transportation systems that had brought the world closer together than it had ever been. Airports, train and bus stations had now became lines of lethal transmission that bound Wuhan to Lombardy, Valencia to Milan, in the first genuinely global emergency that many of us had ever known.

We understood that our chances of survival depended on the men and women who were on the frontline risking their own lives, because they didn’t have the necessary protective equipment. It was a sombre and humbling realisation. Under better rulers than the ones we had, and in a better time than the one we have been living through, such a moment might have become the basis for a better society. Many other people clearly believed this. I remember walking through deserted Sheffield streets in which every window seemed to have a child’s drawing of a rainbow or a message praising the NHS.

The hope we placed in the NHS was easy. It was far more difficult to trust a government that millions of us had no faith in, led by a man whose entire career had been based on lying and bluff, who presented himself to us as a pandemic Churchill and who - we now know - believed that people who had passed a certain age had had ‘a good innings’ and should be abandoned and left to die.

But nevertheless we did what the government said, because we had no choice. Because we were all, or so it seemed, in the same predicament. We were all dependent on each other, and on people we had never met, and we recognised that we were buying time to help the NHS by reducing transmission, while we waited for a vaccine

Of course we weren’t quite in it together, because we never are. The virus found its way more easily to some sections of the population than others, penetrating faultlines of race, class and social inequality. ‘Lockdown’ was always easier to bear for some people than it was for others. For some it even became pleasurable; for others their homes became cages.

But still we clapped, because NHS workers were beginning to die, because we recognised their courage and heroism, or at least most of us did. In a single week in March 2020, the Royal College of Nursing warned that community nurses in uniform were being spat at in the street by people calling them ‘disease spreaders’, and the Kent Ambulance Service reported that six of its ambulances had had holes drilled into their tyres, so that the vehicles could not be used.

That same month, Piers Corbyn attributed the pandemic to ‘mega-rich control freaks Bill Gates, George Soros+cronies’ in order to produce a ‘world population cull…by their mass vaccination plan containing poison.’ In Pakistan, the rightwing media commentator Zaid Hamid also argued that Bill Gates had created the virus in order to inject Muslims with a vaccine intended to ‘destroy Islam’ and bring about the New World Order. That same month, the government of Michigan cancelled its legislative session after armed protesters converged on the state capital for a ‘Judgement Day’ protest against Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s shutdown orders, after Facebook groups called for her to be hanged, shot, beaten, and beheaded.

In April, the powerful ‘You Clap for Me’ video/poem was read out by BAME and foreign NHS workers who had only recently been vilified as intruders and parasites. This provoked a storm of vicious abuse on Twitter from the usual suspects, who called it ‘racist’ and ‘political.’

By the end of that month I, and many others, had stopped clapping, when Johnson caught Covid and a Central Office propaganda effort began asking us all to ‘clap for the boss’, as if the man who had boasted about shaking hands with everybody only weeks before had suddenly become essential to the NHS. These efforts were every bit as grubby as we had come to expect, whether it was the ministers who had themselves photographed while clapping, or the Daily Mail blaming Michel Barnier for infecting Johnson.

In March the urologist Dr Abdul Mabud Chowdhury sent the following message to Johnson in March asking for protective equipment:

Remember we may be doctor/nurse/HCA/allied health workers who are in direct contact with patients but we are also human beings trying to live in this world disease free with our family and friends. People appreciate us and salute us for our rewarding jobs which is very inspirational, but I would like to say we have to protect ourselves and our families in this global disaster.

Three weeks after that message, Dr Chowdhury died at the age of 54.

By June 2021, 1,500 NHS workers had died of Covid, yet still Matt Hancock was denying that PPE shortages had anything to do with it. This was the political strategy of the government: deny responsibility for anything that it had done wrong or not done: seek to gain political advantages wherever it could, whether it was ‘Captain Tom’, the NHS, or Brexit-boosting ‘we rolled out the vaccine first’ gloating. And last, but not least, ensure that some of its friends made a lot of money.

It was horrendous to watch this from a distance, but as Breathtaking makes clear, it was far, far worse for those who had to face the consequences every day of their working lives. And, as one would expect from Rachel Clarke, the series pulls no punches in identifying who was responsible. It’s painfully grating to hear Johnson’s oily homilies and Bertie-Booster posturing alternate with scenes of patients being intubated. I remember very well how Johnson told the nation, in May 2020, in one of his many convoluted jokey metaphors:

We have come through the peak. Or rather we’ve come under what could have been a vast peak, as though we’ve been going through some huge alpine tunnel. And we can now see the sunlight and pasture ahead of us.

That same month I read a piece in the Manchester Evening News on the care home crisis in the city:

Residents in care homes across Greater Manchester are dying painful, lonely deaths – ‘drowning’ in the fluid building up in their lungs, crying out for loved ones who never arrive and suffering nightmarish hallucinations…Staff tell of feeling powerless as they lose resident after resident to this cruel disease. They say they have seen patients test positive for Covid-19 in hospital before being moved to a care home without disclosure of their condition – risking the lives of staff and the elderly….And they live daily with the problem that’s plagued key workers from the start – the shortage of testing and PPE

No sunlit pastureland there. So many of these horrors have been forgotten, much too quickly. The pandemic ended - or seemed to end - with COVID IS A HOAX and I DO NOT CONSENT marches in London; with boozy parties in Downing Street; with Matt Hancock eating kangaroo testicles on a reality tv show; with rightwing shills calling nurses lazy; with the government attacking nurses and doctors who had the temerity to ask for pay rises; with the main opposition party calling once again for NHS ‘reform’.

So far more than 223,300 people in the UK have died with Covid on their death certificates. Many of them should not have died, but many more would have died, had it not been for the men and women celebrated in this short but devastating series. The nation has moved on, in part, because it suited the government and its supporters to move on. Here and there a few attempts at commemoration and recognition have been made, to those who lost their lives:

And to the key workers who tried to save them, or delivered food to their communities:

But the powers-that-be have returned to their default setting in their treatment of the NHS workers they once told us to clap for. Last year, it was Steve Barclay accusing junior doctors of harming patients and wasting NHS cash. Only two weeks ago James Cleverly was bragging that the government intends to prevent carehome workers from bringing their dependents with them. Even Nigel Farage now feels able to tell junior doctors they are asking for too much money.

All this is an affront to fairness and justice, and Breathtaking reminds us how offensive it is. And we shouldn’t need tv dramas to remember the heroism showed by so many men and women when the country was on its knees; we should be able to recognise it when we see it. I remember at some point in the pandemic one of Matt Hancock’s cronies dared to claim that he was ‘the best of us.’

Hancock’s needy attention-grabbing narcissism has made it clear that he thinks the same. But he is wrong on so many levels. Our NHS workers were the best of us, even though most of their names will never be known to us. They fought the pandemic and fought for the lives of their patients in spite of, and not because of, their government. And even if we can’t make up for the mistakes that were made in 2020, and which forced so many people in the NHS to take risks that no public servants should ever have to take, we can at least make sure that the nurses, doctors, and other NHS workers get the pay and conditions they deserve, and the support they need.

They helped us get through the last Great Pandemic, and none of us can say that we won’t need them for the next one. In a country that has had little to be proud of in recent years, we should all take pride in what they did. We should acknowledge the bravery, the dedication, and the service of those who gave so much to save so many.

Because if British society can’t do that, then what kind of society is it?