Hospital
BBC Two
★★★★☆
Midsomer Murders
ITV
★★★☆☆
About 500m east of St Mary’s Hospital in London stands a huge four-star hotel, the Hilton London Metropole. I mention it only because if Mrs May and, were his time ever to come, Mr Corbyn, serious about supporting the NHS, they would sequester at least three of its floors for St Mary’s recovering patients. One would become an intensive care ward, another a high dependency unit and a third would be for old people not ready to go home and those with no home to which to return.
We would, of course, be living not only in an even more highly taxed society but a totalitarian one, yet the second episode of the stunning documentary series Hospital makes us half yearn for it. Tom Currie and Gilly Greenslade’s series is unusual. It has discovered a new dynamic in healthcare and reality drama, in which the will to save lives is pitted against a pitiful shortage of places in which patients can get better after their operations. It is not so much An Hour to Save Your Life as a day to find a bed.
To know 60-year-old Peter Lai, if only briefly and vicariously, was to love him. He had lived for 20 years with an aortic aneurysm in his chest. When (not if) it burst he would die. He faced an operation so hazardous that his consultant, Colin Bicknell, had assembled a surgery team of 14. Yet Lai’s countenance betrayed nothing but benign calm, even as he waited and waited, the day before the scheduled surgery, for a bed to come free. Two beds, actually: one in intensive care and one where he could simply sleep the night before.
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The cameras restlessly roamed the ICU, chocka with patients, and then the rest of the hospital, where there was a Polish mechanic with a bad leg, who slept in the cars he repaired and had nowhere to be discharged to; where sharp, cheerful 91-year-old Dolly waited guiltily for a care home to take her; and where a young builder was admitted to A&E with head injuries. Each was part of a domino chain at which Lai stood at the head. In the end, the operation was cancelled, the team reassembled a month later. They worked their miracle but, heartbreakingly, Lai died six weeks later of pneumonia in St Mary’s. It seems time we decided whether we can afford to give others like Peter Lai their chance of old age — or whether this grim chaos is ended formally and punitively by rationing.
Although death lies all around, life is sunnier in Midsomer Murders. When a body was last night found in the marquee of the small pets show, John Barnaby’s wife Sarah merely murmured: “Oh no.” I hate, then, to recall the dark days of 2011 when Midsomer’s co-creator, Brian True-May, left the programme after suggesting it had no place for ethnic minorities. Well, yesterday the pathologist was black, and three cast members had Indian names — their roles, in spite of last night’s guest stars Steve Pemberton and Susan Hampshire, were significant. Yet, as True-May put it, the series still looked like the “last bastion of Englishness”. Whatever was the problem?
andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk