Breathtaking is the kind of drama Jed Mercurio should be making

The odd thing about this origin story — and I thought this even at the time — was that, for all of Line of Duty’s many strengths, a purist passion for authenticity didn’t seem to be one of them. And this was even before Bodyguard, which was mental. Indeed, much like a young Dr Mercurio rolling his eyes at Casualty winging it, or whatever, you can easily imagine some fresh copper being so maddened by OCGs, CHISs and blinky Morse code reveals that he would have smashed his telly with his truncheon.

Bearing all that in mind, one way of thinking about Breathtaking is that it’s the sort of heavy, credible, deeply unsilly drama that, in a parallel world, another Mercurio could have been making all along. Coming from the one we’ve come to know, though, it was a bit of a surprise.

Based on the memoirs of Rachel Clarke, a hospital doctor through the Covid pandemic, it oozed bleak authenticity. Joanne Froggatt played the consultant Abbey Henderson, fighting to keep the wheels on while the NHS fell apart. This made her a hero, but she didn’t get to feel like one. Early on, knowing the pandemic as we all now do, we were almost more aware of the big picture than she was. Lockdown hadn’t started yet, so at first it was only us who winced whenever she was up close and maskless in a wheezing patient’s face. We saw her sending elderly patients back into care homes without tests because that’s what she had been told to do. We also saw the relatives who called her a murderer because of it. We saw her talking nurses out of making their own PPE so as not to scare the patients, and we saw when one of them died.

• Rachel Clarke was a Covid doctor. Trolls still call her a ‘killer’

There have been quite a few Covid dramas by now, to the extent that they are almost a genre. All cold and hurried, with hushed voices and beeps in the background, Breathtaking fitted firmly in. More than any other so far, though, it reminded us that if Covid was a war, then hospitals were the battlefields.

Over three episodes the plot arc was long — things just got worse — but you could feel Mercurio’s skill in the way he kept the action ticking along, even if beat-by-beat we might not have precisely understood what was going on. Again and again, people died, and not usually even because medical science couldn’t save them, but because of a swirling, under-resourced chaos that wouldn’t let it. For doctors, this was torture. You lost track of how many times they had to tell families, over the phone, that they couldn’t come to say goodbye.

Froggatt was excellent, but so was everyone here, particularly Bhav Joshi as Ant, a medical registrar. If I have a criticism, it’s that Breathtaking often seemed to be hunting a little too obviously for human villains, particularly as it struggled to find them. “It is not your fault,” stricken relatives were told, after family members were infected at Christmas gatherings. “You were told that it was OK.” Perhaps my memory is defective, but this seemed to ignore the way an awful lot of other people, in other areas, were simultaneously told that it was not.

“There’s no plan,” said Ant, another time. “They’re making it up as they go along. They’re just numbers.” Yet there was no sense that our doctor heroes really knew what the plan ought to be either, at least within the constraints of the possible, beyond “not this”.

By the end, Abbey had turned whistleblower thanks to another group of villains, Covid deniers. To make this work, though, we were vaguely given the impression of a world in which almost nobody outside the hospital believed in Covid, which is not quite the world I remember. Gamely, the script tried to make a direct link between government failures and conspiracy theories on the basis that people didn’t really understand how bad the hospital situation was, “and these stories fill that gap”. Is that really where they came from, though? I can’t help but feel that stronger lockdowns and fewer deaths would have led to more conspiracy and denialism rather than less.

But look, I don’t mean to quibble. Years from now, when people want to understand how Covid really was, it’s dramas like this that will tell them. As for Mercurio, I’d love to see him make more stuff like this. Although I do wonder just how hard he had to fight the urge, perhaps round about the middle of episode two, to send in a Swat team.

Steffan Rhodri in The Way

BBC

The Way is brave and unusual, which is always welcome, but also nonsense, which isn’t. Created by Adam Curtis (of woo-woo documentary fame), written by James Graham (of various political dramas) and directed by Michael Sheen (of things with Michael Sheen in them) it is an alternative history. Based round the struggling steel factory in Sheen’s Welsh home town, Port Talbot, it shows a strike that foments into a revolution.

Perhaps the biggest problem this drama has can be summed up by the way I felt after watching the first episode. My initial assumption was that I’d survived a novel but slightly shit short film, and my work was done. Then I realised I had another two hours to go. Bleak.

Shot like an apocalypse movie, it shows us protests degenerating into everybody fighting everybody else, but not for any very obvious reason. There is also a mystical red monk wandering about, and somebody has a sword. At one point I think the BNP turn up, although why they would have strong views about a Welsh steelworks I honestly couldn’t say. And then — and I’m paraphrasing, but only a bit — everybody runs away.

• Michael Sheen: Prince Andrew, Port Talbot and why I quit Hollywood

Aside from the effortful weirdness of Curtis, who even in his documentaries is a lot better at feelings than facts, I think the main problem is political. From the start, The Way is so confident in its moral stance that it never quite bothers to make it. Sitting oddly alongside their wit, literary references and poetic eloquence, the Port Talbot protesters are depicted as parodies of socialist entitlement, universally convinced that the only possible reason for the distant hand of big government not to swoop in and spend billions to save unprofitable heavy industry is that somebody, somewhere, is being a bastard.

It’s doubtless the latent Tory in me, but I find myself yearning for somebody to go, “Hey, maybe I’ll start a small business!” or even just, “Bugger all this, I’ll move to Cardiff.” Clearly there is bubbling away here some manner of Marxist theory about an enlightened proletariat yearning for an escape from false consciousness, and so on. But come on, guys, this is BBC1. You kinda need to spell it out.

Things progress, anyway, into a sort of anti-Welsh dystopia, which tries too hard to draw parallels with the refugee crisis and the war in Ukraine, and relies heavily on Curtis making wibbly noises with his Casio keyboard to signpost the thinky bits. Also, there is something about mystical destiny, algorithms and AI going on, but God, enough. Speaking of alternate realities, maybe there’s a better one out there where they got Russell T Davies to make this instead.

Storyville — Total Trust: Surveillance State

BBC

For a real dystopia, take a look at Storyville — Total Trust: Surveillance State, a deep, horrifying look at how a combination of technological intrusion and outright authoritarianism has turned China into perhaps the most tightly controlled society on Earth.

This documentary followed two families and a journalist, all of whom are at the sharp end of the Chinese state. Weiping Chang, a father and human rights lawyer, is in jail. His wife, Zijuan Chen, advocates for his freedom while facing daily harassment. Similar harassment is meted out against Quenzhang Wang, another lawyer recently released from prison, and his wife, Wenzu Li. Both of these families have young, bewildered sons. Sophie Xeuqin Huang, meanwhile, is a journalist who exposed institutional sexism. By the end, she was in jail too.

Cameras follow these people everywhere they go, but that’s just the start of it. Whenever Wenzu Li appears on social media, even if it’s just a video posted by a relative after a family celebration, the account is immediately cancelled. It’s not, though, all about technology. When nameless, faceless officials don’t want them to leave their flats, other nameless people station themselves outside their front doors. This is the state as a smothering fog. No actual person can be held accountable for anything.

In the city of Rongcheng, a pilot plan has divided streets up into grids with volunteer officers, each one of which is responsible for a thousand people. Those guilty of “past improper behaviour” face particular scrutiny. “Facial recognition will make our work easier,” said one volunteer, gratefully. This all works thanks to China’s social credit system. Volunteer for 300 hours, that’s 50 points. You can lose points for crossing at a red light (-5), spreading rumours online (-20) or “extravagance at a wedding or funeral” (-20). You can also lose 50 points for complaining to central government about the whole points thing. Poor credit affects the schools your kids can go to. Wenzu Li’s son tends to move every term.

The strongest message of this excellent documentary, made by the Chinese film-maker Jialing Zhang, was that these systems don’t just affect dissidents. Everybody has to play along because everybody is scared not to. Communities and even families end up disowning deemed troublemakers in their midst. True totalitarianism, it reminds you, doesn’t just come from the state, but eventually from almost everyone, and gleefully too. There’s always a cheap thrill, I know, in pretending British freedoms are collapsing too. But my God. We don’t know we’re born.

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