Sick of the browbeating

LAST time I visited my friend Lew he was scrupulously spooning bits of stew into freezer bags and labelling them. I thought this was odd, because I’ve sometimes had to stop my wasteful pal from throwing half-eaten legs of lamb away.

Had he finally realised how wrong it was to waste food? “I’ve always known it was wrong,” he said.

“I just got sick of my mum going on about hungry children in Africa when I was a kid.” Fifty-years-old, with a mother in the grave for 20 of them, Lew had seen the light.

Going on about something too much, though, can produce perverse reactions. Watching THE NHS: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY (BBC4) last night, I sensed something like that happening to myself. I couldn’t appreciate and value the NHS more than I do already and yet, somehow, someone telling me every night, at length, how much I ought to appreciate it brings out my inner Donald Trump.

However old and valued an institution is, more can quite often mean less and vice-versa.

A few well done and carefully chosen programmes might have paid a better tribute, made the point and been watched more enthusiastically. That said, if I’d had a hand in picking them, last night’s would have been on there.

Presented by Alex Brooker – who’d had dozens of lengthy encounters with the NHS before he’d reached primary school age – this was more of an oral history than a hymn of praise.

An NHS uncut, if you like, and don’t wince at the surgical reference. Retired nurses recalled how they’d fled Ireland to escape the nuns, then found the hospital matrons even more malevolent.

Girls who’d had no option but to seek back-street abortions recalled the harsh treatment they’d had on the hospital wards.

Alan Bennett, among others, recalled how mental health care remained stuck in the medieval age, while transplant surgeons and test-tube babies basked in glory.

You could create a new institution or even – as the postwar, almost-communist Labour government hoped – a new world, but people were slower to change.

When they did, though, the NHS played its own part. People coming from India and the West Indies to help run the NHS changed Britain into a multicultural society.

Rigid class barriers got a longoverdue dose of NHS medicine, levelling the field with universal treatments and vaccinations.

As my mum used to say, Lennon, McCartney and Co. would never have become pop stars with pre-war teeth.

Like a jelly melting at a kids’ party, FOOD UNWRAPPED (Ch4) seems less solid as time goes on. The basic idea is to answer those questions we’ve all asked about our daily diet but the longer the show goes on for, the less universal those questions seem to become.

Has anyone seriously wondered why you can’t put fresh papaya into a jelly? If they had, wouldn’t they assume it was something in the papaya that stopped the jelly setting (as indeed it is)?

Then there’s ice cubes. Call me a philistine but I’ve spent zero seconds wondering why the ice in my gin and tonic at a smart bar is clear, while the cubes I make at home are cloudy. If I had, I’d have assumed the people at the bar owned a better freezer than me.

Again, guess what, that was more or less the truth.

Food Unwrapped? More like Food Needlessly Picked Apart.