When Dr Rachel Clarke first started writing down her experiences of working on a Covid-19 ward, she never meant to make them public. Scribbled at her kitchen table, mostly in the middle of the night when she was too stressed to sleep, her notes were originally intended as a kind of private therapy: a place to process all the horrors she felt she couldn’t talk about, or not to anyone who hadn’t been there.
It was only after the news of Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle broke – exposing the shocking disparity between the sacrifices ordinary people were being asked to make and the way people in government felt entitled to behave – that she became angry enough to turn those notes into the memoir that ultimately became this week’s ITV drama Breathtaking.
When I interviewed Clarke a few weeks ago and asked if her experiences of Covid-19 had changed her as a person, I was wondering about the cumulative emotional impact of witnessing so many deaths one after the other. But the really transformative thing, she said, had been living through “the unforgivable human consequence of lack of candour from a government with the public”. By intercutting real-life news footage of politicians giving smoothly reassuring press conferences with dramatic portrayals of what was actually happening on NHS wards, this series brings that sickening feeling of being lied to and betrayed almost violently to life.
We have known for a long time now about nurses cobbling together makeshift protective aprons from bin bags, even as the Department of Health publicly insisted there was never a PPE shortage, or about the desperate shunting of potentially Covid-positive people out of hospital into care homes without testing them first. The opening scene of Breathtaking, in which fictional consultant Abbey Henderson discovers that a mask meant to protect her from a deadly virus doesn’t fit because it was shaped for male jaws, meanwhile almost uncannily echoes the evidence given by senior civil servant Helen MacNamara to the Covid inquiry last year about how hard it was to get the problems women were experiencing with PPE taken seriously in Whitehall.
But, as with Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the ITV drama about wrongly convicted subpostmasters whose consequences are still reverberating through British politics this week, drama is still capable of illuminating things that public inquiries cannot. And never more so perhaps than in the days running up to yet another set of junior doctors’ strikes, hitting English hospitals from Saturday, Welsh ones from Wednesday and Northern Irish ones in March.
Like most people with a loved one on an NHS waiting list, I am frankly nervous about any kind of industrial action that can only push the service closer to breaking point, however well founded. But I wonder if Breathtaking isn’t going to tip the scales of public opinion strongly towards the junior doctors’ cause, just at the point where sympathy might have started to run out.
Being locked down at home was of course torture for plenty of people, from women trapped in abusive relationships to parents trying to entertain stir-crazy children in flats with no outside space, not to mention the chronically lonely. But what this TV series quietly illuminates is the difference between what many of those at home experienced, difficult as it was, and what frontline medical staff went through on our behalf.
Some sadly did not survive to tell the story. Others have been left with life-changing physical illness or disability as a result of contracting Covid-19, or else suffered mental breakdown and burnout, in some cases to the point of having to leave medicine entirely. Last year a survey of more than 600 doctors with long Covid symptoms, carried out by the pressure group Long Covid Doctors for Action, found fewer than one in three (31%) doctors said they were working full-time, compared with more than half (57%) before the onset of their illness. Almost one in five were too ill to work at all. And despite the government’s promises of specialist clinics to treat this still poorly understood condition, more than half felt their symptoms hadn’t been properly investigated.
Many of those still working in the NHS struggle with the feeling that it’s self-indulgent to talk about their experiences during the height of the pandemic, or that nobody wants to hear them. Yet for civilian doctors and nurses, this was the closest thing most will ever experience to life in a war zone, and the parallels with soldiers returning from deployment are unmistakable: the flashbacks (and sometimes PTSD), the difficulty in talking about it to anyone who wasn’t there and doesn’t understand, and above all the bleakly isolating sense that the world just wants to move on and forget about all that now.
There is no NHS or social care equivalent of the military covenant, or the understanding that those willing to risk their lives on behalf of their country can expect to be looked after by the state in return. But watching Breathtaking may well make you wonder why not.
As Clarke told me, it’s not that doctors expected anything so crude as a financial reward for doing their jobs at the height of a pandemic, but they didn’t expect to end up actively worse off in real terms than they were a decade ago. For all the fine words spoken about care workers when they were the ones holding dying people’s hands in nursing homes, both main parties have meanwhile gone suspiciously quiet about social care in the run-up to an election, as an exasperated Andrew Dilnot (who was commissioned by David Cameron back in 2010 to propose supposedly urgent reforms) noted at the weekend.
The speed with which public gratitude evaporated once it came to putting real money on the table remains startling and shameful. Frontline workers’ feeling of having been let down and lied to, meanwhile, doesn’t go away simply because most of the individual politicians presiding over that tawdry era have been succeeded by another intake.
Given that living through the pandemic was miserable enough, I didn’t initially think I wanted to watch a drama about it, no matter how grippingly written. But Breathtaking is a timely reminder that lockdown divided us into two starkly different worlds: those who spent the first and second waves in hospital, either as patients or as staff, and those who can only imagine what that was like. Four years on, we can argue about how exactly the moral debt to frontline workers should be paid. But it has just become infinitely harder to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
