This timely volume explores the close relationship television has always had with the National Health Service. Taking a chronological approach to examine the multiple ways in which TV has presented the NHS since the 1950s, the chapters delve into key moments in television history and how they reflect and shape our view of public health.These chapters span the key moments in television history which deal with this subject in many forms, from the 1960s soap opera to the 1970s hospital comedy to the cosy “NHS as heritage” offered by Call the Midwife, via the melodrama of shows like Casualty and the gothic hospital dramas of Jed Mercurio. Beginning with the early dramatisations of the NHS wards, which reflected storylines that combined romance, illness, and sometimes death, the book then shows how, over the years, the depiction of NHS doctors, nurses, and other staff as heroic and romantic has been countered with dramatisations of the impact of austerity cuts, hospital mergers, and competition from the private sector.This book will interest students and scholars of television and media studies, the history of television, the medical humanities, cultural studies, gender studies, and in the growing area of narrative medicine.
Katherine Byrne is Senior Lecturer in English at Ulster University, Northern Ireland, UK.Julie Anne Taddeo is Research Professor of History at University of Maryland, USA.James Leggott is Associate Professor in 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