Free at the point of use
It’s seven decades since Britons were first able to go to the doctor without worrying about the bill
The NHS has so often been at the forefront of medical advances
NHS at 70 TV & RADIO BBC networks From Friday 25 June
The National Health Service turns 70 this year. It’s an anniversary marked with a season of shows across the BBC. The centrepiece of the season is an as-yet untitled live 90-minute show hosted by Nick Robinson and Anita Rani (BBC Two) that draws on research from four think tanks to debate the future of the service.
There’s plenty of programming to add context to such discussions. Hospitals that Changed the World (BBC Two) looks at five institutions, each in a different region, that demonstrate how the NHS has so often been at the forefront of medical advances. Made in conjunction with the University of Warwick’s history department and co-commissioned by the Open University, The People’s History of the
NHS (BBC Four) sees comedian Alex Brooker fronting a “crowd-sourced” take on the service’s story. Matron,
Medicine and Me (BBC One) features five celebrities – including Fern Britton, Denise Lewis and Si King – who have reasons to say thanks to the NHS.
On Radio 4, National Health Stories
(Monday 18 June) is a 20-part series in which Professor Sally Sheard of Liverpool University charts the innovations and events that have shaped healthcare in the UK. The series covers such topics as links between the invention of the hip replacement and the advent of the sterile operating theatre, and the impact of the pill on attitudes to the health needs of women.
In UK Confidential: The Birth of
the NHS (Radio 4, Saturday 30 June), Martha Kearney trawls through the archives to chart the arguments that went on behind the scenes in the run-up to the establishment of the NHS. In part, it’s a story of how the British Medical Association watered down proposals for a comprehensive national health service, as envisaged in the 1942 Beveridge Report and detailed in a subsequent white paper (1944).
One of the central figures in these arguments would have been Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee’s minister of health. For Out of Tredegar (Radio 4, Friday 29 June), Michael Sheen profiles a man whose worldview was shaped by his upbringing in the Welsh valleys.