A common wealth of admiration for the Queen
The Queen: Her Commonwealth Story (BBC One) had plenty going for it: a beaming, engaged host in George Alagiah; spectacular location photography, both contemporary (as Alagiah trotted the globe) and from the archives; and talking heads of a very superior calibre, from a wry Princess Royal to former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke. Yet for all of the charming anecdotes and evocative footage, genuine insights were few and far between, at least during a first half-hour that would have felt mightily familiar to fans of The Crown.
Offering an exhaustive account of the callow, sometimes visibly nervous new Queen’s six-month-long 1953 tour to promote the Commonwealth, which was founded in 1949 in response to decolonisation, the documentary showed her delighting crowds from Tonga to the Australian outback, while assorted luminaries remembered her “almost like a goddess descending from Mount Olympus”. This lengthy segment was like sitting through someone’s big-budget holiday videos.
But it did intrigue, especially on those occasions where deference faltered and the Queen was required to adapt to a changing geopolitical landscape. After winning over Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, with a spin on the dancefloor in 1961, she completed her charm offensive with a speech in which she lamented how pregnancy had forced the postponement of a previous visit. The infant Andrew would one day make “amends for the inconvenience he caused”, she mused.
She negotiated two potentially tricky trips to India, a nation which bore the brunt of Empire’s worst excesses, with grace and discretion, but it was her efforts to nudge a reluctant Margaret Thatcher into toughening her stance on Apartheid South Africa that really gripped. The qualified success of these manoeuvres was rather fudged in the documentary, while we could only ever take the many assertions of her people skills at face value; the scant audio of the Queen in conversation with heads of state climaxed with the following, to the PM of Fiji: “come through and we can talk about Fiji”.
The uncertain future of the Commonwealth and its nations’ relationship with Elizabeth II’S successor was not covered, nor was it ever quite explained why the Commonwealth is so important, either in symbolic or practical terms, to its 53 member states. Given the access, it smacked of a missed opportunity.
So far, 2018 has so far brought me a daughter, a terminal illness for my dad and many visits to hospital. These experiences have been alarming, exposing a creaking system, ballooning patient numbers and slashed budgets, yet also heartening; the majority of the staff were good-humoured, patient and unshakably dedicated.
Hospital (BBC Two), which has been transplanted after two series from Imperial College Healthcare Trust to the Nottingham University Hospital Trust, reflected all of this and more. Filmed during the recent winter crisis, the documentary illuminated the dreadful mess in which much of the NHS now finds itself.
With its 1,700 beds occupied and more than 20 patients awaiting admittance, the Hospital Trust entered black alert. While non-urgent operations were cancelled, this didn’t ease the number of patients who no longer needed medical care – such as 86-year-old dementia patient Mavis, who couldn’t be discharged because of inadequate social-care provision. You didn’t need a doctorate to deduce the connection between social-care budgets and the predicament of frontline services. Elsewhere, 12-yearold Keilan awaited an operation on his twisted spine, which was worsening after two cancelled operations.
Less heralded but equally relevant were the collateral frustrations: highly qualified surgeons standing idle after having their diaries involuntarily cleared; the payments for those same cancelled elective operations stripped from the income of a trust that’s already £24m in debt.
What could have been relentlessly harrowing and depressing was lifted by the fortitude of staff and patients under enormous duress. While Mavis was successfully discharged to a care home and Keilan received his lifechanging operation, many other stories won’t have ended so happily. As the margins of the NHS grow thinner by the month, urgent, radical surgery looks inevitable. This fascinating layer cake of a documentary series continues to demonstrate why with grim, angering clarity.
The Queen: Her Commonwealth Story ★★★
Hospital ★★★★