A man wakes up in casualty after a grand mal seizure. The junior doctor explains that it's probably simple epilepsy but that he may need further tests to exclude something more serious. He will be admitted overnight for observation.
Six million of us have watched the man being wheeled, fitting, from the ambulance to the resuscitation room. We have seen his vomit being sucked through a tube by an impassive nurse. We have zoomed in on a close up of him spitting out his airway, and another of his wife crouching to wipe away tear smeared makeup from public view.
A doctor explains the diagnosis articulately to camera. Six or more months into their rotation, the casualty officers know their emergency routines backwards. Despite being frighteningly young, they inspire confidence in the viewers. “That guy over there's had a heart attack. He's waiting for a porter to take him to coronary care.”
We zoom again, to an elderly man on a trolley, clammy with sweat and clutching a cotton sheet. A voiceover tells us his age, the area in which he lives, his ethnic origin, and that his wife is demented and his daughter distraught. At the end of the programme, the voiceover will tell us, with scripted compassion, that the man did not survive.
A bloke slipped on spiked railings trying to break into a pop festival. He's done a nasty to his bum. He talks to camera. “Stupid thing to do, wasn't it?” asks the interviewer while the man waits, attached to a morphine drip, for the surgeon to arrive. He is presented in somewhat comical terms—a bit of light relief from the serious cases.
Real drama, real ratings. The television-watching public, no longer entertained by fiction, demands a nightly menu of the abject, the gory, and the plain intrusive. Hospitals need to generate income, some desperately. Those featured in these fly-on-the-wall programmes presumably give what a lawyer would call consent, and they get a take-home memoir to show friends. Win-win all round, then.
The next patient whose private suffering becomes the nation's entertainment could be your mother or mine. Where is the ethical committee whose job it is to make the case for protecting the sick and vulnerable from these uncivilised incursions?