Rachel Clarke was one of the doctors we all clapped for and celebrated during lockdown. One of those NHS heroes whose praises were sung by ex-prime minister Boris Johnson and former health secretary Matt Hancock. One of the doctors who cared for people dying from Covid-19 on overcrowded wards while wearing inadequate PPE, fearing for their lives and despairing at the lack of political leadership.
“I don’t know anybody in the NHS who worked with Covid patients who isn’t today deeply scarred and traumatised by the experience,” Clarke says. “People are not talking about it very much. Because in a way everyone’s in the same boat and you don’t want to moan about your own experience.
“I have conversations with people who start to cry within moments of reflecting on what they experienced. Coming to work in the morning and finding that four of your patients died overnight. Horrendous.
This is already a big year for brilliantly told TV drama showcasing epic failures of leadership in this country. It is prime time for stories of dedicated public servants being utterly betrayed by people in power. Now, hot on the heels of Mr Bates vs The Post Office comes Breathtaking, an ITV drama based on Clarke’s book charting the early days of the pandemic from the NHS frontline.
150,000 NHS workers are left with long Covid. Some are starting a lawsuit against the NHS because they felt they were sent into an unsafe environment.
Breathtaking star, Joanne Froggatt
Clarke co-wrote Breathtaking with Line of Duty supremo (and former doctor) Jed Mercurio and actor-writer-director (and another former doctor) Prasanna Puwanarajah. It is vital viewing – unless we were gravely ill, most of us did not get to see what went on in hospitals during this period. Even if our loved ones were ill or dying.
The tears are still visible in Clarke’s eyes as we talk, two hours after a screening of the new series. To watch Breathtaking is to replay the trauma she experienced in real time after asking to be redeployed from specialist palliative care in a hospice to Covid wards in Oxford and Banbury, where her skills were most needed. But, she says, we cannot look away.
“I cried writing the script. I cried on set. And I cried watching it. I just hope NHS workers feel seen,” says Clarke. “It feels as though, in a way, society desperately wants to move on, to say, ‘That was awful, let’s now turn away, pretend it never happened, look forwards.’
“But NHS staff don’t have that luxury. Because what we experienced was too traumatic. I dearly wish we could have a public conversation about what we experienced because if we want to avoid a similar death toll next time round – and there will be another pandemic – we need to learn the lessons from this one. And that means looking at what happened unflinchingly.”
Breathtaking takes us into the heart of the pandemic, reproducing scenes that were taking place in NHS wards across the country. It sets these scenes against the real-life timeline of press conference footage of Johnson, reminding us how politicians were responding to the crisis. So it is that we see Dr Abbey Henderson (played by Joanne Froggatt) in the days before lockdown, already treating people with Coronavirus symptoms but not allowed to test them, while also being denied protective equipment.
The hospital is already beginning to resemble a war zone as the prime minister addresses the nation, saying: “I was at a hospital the other night where there were a few Coronavirus patients. And I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know.”
The contrast of their words and behaviour with the selflessness of the frontline NHS workers is stark. After the suffering, the loss, the collective trauma, are we now ready for this story? As ready as we may ever be, is the response from those involved with Breathtaking.
“I very passionately wanted to be part of telling this story,” says Froggatt. “As the public, we need to know. This is the truth. This is what these people were risking every day, and this is what they suffered. Some are still suffering, some paid the ultimate price, so we can’t let this be brushed under the carpet. We have to get these people’s story out.
Joanne Froggatt stars in Breathtaking. Image: ITV/ITVX
“It was the ethos of the whole project to make it as authentic as possible. So we give the truth of the lived experience of the NHS workers alongside the press conferences from the government. Then people are left to make their own minds up.”
Froggatt has a strong history of appearing in TV series that capture the public imagination. In Downton Abbey, she even appeared alongside a Mr Bates. The response to ITV’s recent series about the Post Office scandal suggests audiences will connect to this story. “The facts speak for themselves. We were told there wasn’t a PPE shortage. There was. People were given PPE contracts that shouldn’t have been. We were told care homes were ringfenced. They weren’t. Huge mistakes were made.
“There are 150,000 NHS workers that are left with long Covid. And some are now starting a lawsuit against the NHS because they felt they were sent into an unsafe environment.”
Co-writer Puwanarajah was a junior doctor alongside Clarke in Oxford, before leaving the NHS to pursue a career as an actor, writer and director (most recently seen as Martin Bashir in The Crown). “We’ve seen from Mr Bates… that there is an enormous public appetite to understand why we weren’t treated with the respect we are entitled to be treated with by the people in power,” he says. “We are still awaiting the results of the public inquiry. And the longer we wait, the bigger the wound. We’ve had a revolving door of unelected leadership in this country and we’re heading towards a general election. Questions need to be asked.”
Many people will find the answers in Breathtaking hard to stomach. We’ve known about the failure to prepare, the long, deadly delay in initiating lockdown, and, of course, the behaviour of people working in Downing Street for some time. But to see it from this angle is still shocking. And these are the issues that have been front and centre for Clarke ever since she began furiously writing her diary – with no intention to publish it – during so many sleepless nights at the start of the pandemic.
“For a medic, my first duty is to do no harm,” she recalls. “We couldn’t fathom why the government wasn’t also trying to do no harm by locking down. As doctors, we were watching, horrified, as the pandemic so clearly started to spread across the UK – and there was a window when we could have locked down and potentially saved tens of thousands of lives. But there was inexplicable inertia.
“Then, when the Partygate revelations broke, I was incandescent with rage. And the reason I felt such rage was on behalf of the people I had seen throughout the pandemic. Decent, honourable members of the public were obeying rules while staff in 10 Downing Street were flouting them with impunity and joking about it. It was despicable.
“This was the absolute antithesis of what a government in a pandemic should be. Boris Johnson longs to be seen as a Winston Churchill. To my mind, he was the absolute opposite. He was leading the country with a cavalier disregard for not only the rules, but the immense sacrifice that ordinary people made up and down the country.”
Breathtaking is on ITV on 19-21 February and also as a boxset on ITVX.
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