NHS doctor urges public to watch ITV's Breathtaking to see trauma medics endured
The Coronavirus pandemic was a time that none of us will forget.
Lockdown was unprecedented and we all stayed home to protect the NHS and save lives, leaving the streets often deserted. In our hospitals it was a very different story, one of tragedy, fear, chaos and loss, insufficient PPE and beds, and staff who risked their lives for others. All while the Government betrayed them.
This is the story being told in heartbreaking drama Breathtaking, a searing portrayal of the early days of the pandemic through the lens of an NHS doctor. It is based on the blistering memoir of Dr Rachel Clarke and was adapted for the screen by her alongside Line of Duty’s Jed Mercurio and The Crown star Prasanna Puwanarajah, both also former doctors.
Here, writing exclusively for the Mirror, Rachel explains why she felt this story needed to be told again.
Rachel tells her story
Rachel explains why she felt this story needed to be told again (Matthew Chattle/REX/Shutterstock)
Joanne Froggatt stars in the chilling ITV drama series (Dave Benett/Getty Images for Mithridate)There was a moment, standing on set, when I started to feel my chest constricting. We’d turned three storeys of a disused college campus in Belfast into an NHS hospital complete with Covid ward, ICU and A&E.
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The attention to detail was phenomenal. Stains on the ceilings, scuffs on the walls. The long scratches you see inside the entrance of every A&E made by trolleys bashing in from the ambulances outside over the years.
But nothing prepared me for the experience of watching the cameras beginning to roll. Suddenly it all came back, the alarms, the monitors, the claustrophobia, the fear.
Joanne Froggatt – stunningly authentic in the lead role as Dr Abbey Henderson – was there on screen, visibly struggling to suppress her fear as she fumbled with her PPE and faced our fictional hospital’s first suspected case of Covid.
I remembered walking, like her, towards a stricken patient whose every breath, you were horribly aware, might end up claiming your life too. I remembered the colleagues who came up to me at work to ask me to witness them signing their wills – wills they had hastily drawn up in case they died from Covid.
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I remembered the nurses who tried, pitifully, to protect themselves with hospital bin bags because no one would give them any proper PPE. I realised, in that moment, standing on set, that if even I was traumatised by what we were filming, then this drama was going to hit the public hard, not to mention health and care workers who worked on the frontline.
There was never, I realised, any way of making a drama about Covid inside an NHS hospital that was authentic and accurate to what we witnessed and also easy to watch. Because the truth was, it was for nearly all of us a devastating experience.
Joanne Froggatt as Dr Abbey Henderson in the ITV drama series (SCU)We were scared, unprotected, overwhelmed and bewildered. The guidance rarely made sense, the PPE was unforgivably inadequate (my only visor, for example, had been made by children from a local Scout group), and the inertia from the Government was absolutely terrifying.
To put this all on screen – unvarnished, as we lived it – was going to be immensely challenging for viewers. But it mattered, I believed. It had to be shown. Healthcare workers risked their lives to save others. The very least the public could do, I felt strongly, was be willing to bear witness to what that felt like.
Three years since I started work on the series with my co-writers and executive producers Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah, I can hardly believe we’ve finally reached this point where it has really, truly appeared on television. The response has been phenomenal. As I write, #Breathtaking is the number one trend on Twitter/X.
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NHS staff flooded social media with an outpouring of pain, relief and recognition. “This is scarily accurate”, “This is exactly what it was like”, “I am so glad what we went through is out there”.
The rage is there too – rage at the way in which we were, essentially, treated as cannon fodder by a government whose PPE stockpile was woefully, unforgivably inadequate. There’s been stony silence from the Department of Health and Social Care, of course. Likewise from serial liars Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock.
I suppose they think if they keep their heads down and pretend the series isn’t happening, maybe the public won’t notice. Cowards then, cowards now.
A single NHS nurse is worth a thousand of them.
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