Short abstract
BBC 3, Sundays at 9 pm from 23 May
Rating: ★★
Doctors who write fiction are few and far between. This is just as well. The two jobs do not go well together. Chekhov, Maugham, and Conan Doyle practised for a while and then left medicine behind to write about other things. Today it seems harder to let go. The modern medical author writes about doctors, not patients, and starts with juniors.
Many of us found the early years traumatic and coped by developing a veneer of cynicism. This phase came to a natural end if we stuck with the job. Sympathy returned as we relaxed our guard against emotional overload. We learnt the hard way that being rude to colleagues is no way to behave. Those who leave practice, however, never move on. Their perceptions never mature and bad memories are preserved in a time warp.
Jed Mercurio qualified from Birmingham in 1991 and left medicine to find success as the writer of Cardiac Arrest, a gritty television drama about the awful life of junior hospital doctors. After The Grimleys, a sitcom, he wrote Bodies, a gritty novel about the awful life of junior hospital doctors. It is now serialised in six episodes on BBC 3.
In the first episode, a specialist registrar, wise beyond his years, arrives in a curiously undifferentiated department of obstetrics and gynaecology and swiftly encounters near-misses and once-in-a-lifetime disasters in all major subspecialties. Vomiting, death, and sex follow in quick succession, very photogenically (though in the caesarean hysterectomy there is far too little blood).
Figure 1.
Where is the human warmth?
Credit: BBC
Anyone interested in communication skills will find the programme incredible, but this goes for all television drama, whose fashion for terse monosyllabic dialogue is as unrealistic as ballet. The insensitivity of the senior consultant, a stock character wheeled out yet again in Bodies, is beyond parody. Never mind Good Medical Practice, remember the 1980s.
Even our hero is affected by anachronism. Nowadays it is commonplace to talk to women who have checked the internet first. Today's specialist registrar would quickly find herself suspended if she reacted by swearing, evasion, and viciously aggressive “counselling,” as depicted here.
After 45 minutes, the relentless piling of horror upon horror may provoke titters from non-specialist viewers. Specialists will find their credulity stretched by the lack of any reference to protocols, evidence based medicine, appraisals, or clinical governance. Patient safety is solely in the hands of our hero, who in episode two faces the dilemma of whistleblowing on his consultant.
The acting and direction are fine and the atmosphere is tense and brooding. That's the trouble. What Bodies lacks, apart from a sense of perspective, is any feeling for the human warmth that keeps NHS staff going. Mercurio's writing may be technically good but at its heart is a block of ice.