National Health Service on Television

Katherine Byrne is Senior Lecturer in English at Ulster University, Northern Ireland, UK.Julie Anne Taddeo is Research Professor of History at the University of Maryland, USA.James Leggott is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at Northumbria University, UK.

• Introduction; 1. Reassuring or challenging? A survey of representations of the NHS in British TV medical drama since 1971; 2. ‘Fraternising with the Nurses’: Optimism and Pessimism about the NHS in The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads; 3. ‘Take Four Girls’: Angels and the Cultural Configuration of NHS Nurses and Nursing on British Television; 4. Thirty-eight Years in A&E: Charlie Fairhead’s Evolving Representation of the Role of Nursing in Casualty; 5. The Indian Doctor and the Inverse Care Law: How South Asian Physicians Transformed General Practice in the National Health Service; 6. ‘Is your doctor sympathetic? I don’t want one that isn’t’: Call the Midwife’s reimagining of the NHS General Practitioner; 7. ‘Fighting the forces of darkness - and dealing with the burden of everyday admin’: Horror hospitals and the satiric doctor/hero in Jed Mercurio’s Bodies (2004) and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004); 8. ‘The hospital is not your larder’: Representing the NHS in BBC TV’s Being Human; 9. ‘I’m sorry. I really did try’: televised discomfort, physician mental health, and the ‘reality’ of austerity healthcare politics in This Is Going to Hurt; Index