It’s time for TV to lower its dosage of NHS programmes
‘Ijust want to get better, if you know what I mean.” This morose and self-doubting plea may as well be the motto for the National Health Service. The words emerged from the mouth of Martin, an alcoholic with cirrhosis of the liver causing a grotesquely bloated midriff. It would cost hundreds of thousands pounds to give Martin a new liver. A panel of 28 medical professionals convened to decide, in effect, if a transplant would be a waste of taxpayers’ money.
No one asked Martin if he thought that he deserved a second chance. Certainly not Stacey Dooley, the perky celebrity assigned to tell his story in Celebrities on the NHS Front Line (BBC One). Martin dodged a bullet there. He could have got Ann Widdecombe, who was also taking part in this film on how the NHS functions.
In another part of King’s College Hospital in south London, the former minister patrolled the wards making stentorian interventions. The NHS, she diagnosed, was not designed for an unforeseen future consisting of greater longevity in a larger population, the invention of the transplant, a mental health epidemic, plus lots more alcohol, drugs and street violence. “It’s a victim of its own success,” she concluded.
This two-part series is, by way of a 70th-anniversary, a health check-up of the nation’s crown jewel. In the first episode there wasn’t much that hadn’t been divulged in BBC One’s Hospital. The addition of four carefully cast celebrities into the mix was presumably to lure more eyeballs.
The results were mixed. Michael Mosley, formerly a doctor, saw for himself that the system was under far more strain than when he qualified. Jonnie Peacock, whose leg was amputated when he was five, was misplaced witnessing paediatric brain surgery. Dooley, who spent much of her childhood in hospital, was all hugs and tears, but steely in her belief that people need to take care of themselves to protect a creaking institution.
Happy birthday, then, to Aneurin Bevan’s bright idea, but it might be time for television to ease its addiction to profiling the NHS. Greater enlightenment might come from a comparative documentary about other health systems, from poorer models in the Third World to Germany’s gleaming free-for-all to America’s financial lottery.
In 2016, celebrated Japanese TV journalist Noriyuki Yamaguchi was accused of rape by Shiori Ito, a young woman to whom he was offering the prospect of work. “If you want to fight this legally, go for it,” he replied. “There is no way you will win.”
His confidence perhaps derived from his close association with the prime minister Shinzō Abe. But then the odds are stacked against all rape victims in Japan: there is a paucity of rape crisis centres, only eight per cent of the police force is female, and for 110 years the law demanded that accusers prove that they showed some sign of physical resistance.
These are the facts, soberly reported by Japan’s Secret Shame (BBC Two). But what of the emotional impact? This was explored through the demoralising story of Ito’s lonely pursuit of justice in a culture which enables the victimisation of women.
It’s seen as unfeminine in Japan to own up to a libido, so a dominant narrative in Japanese porn, openly displayed in shop windows, is of the girl who says no but is overcome. If a woman drinks, so much the worse for her. As a result, men have no concept of consent. And when women accuse men, a highly traditional society judges them for taking private shame into the public area.
In this sickening rush to blame the victim, it must have taken great courage to stand up. Ito, who studied in New York and speaks fluent English, was an articulate guide to her ordeal in Erica Jenkin’s bleak x-ray of Japan’s phallocratic mindset.
The litany of traumas visited upon Ito included re-enacting her rape for the police with a life-size doll. Some call this “the second rape”. Meanwhile, on a topical chat show, Yamaguchi and a nodding panel of men expressed their lofty disgust for women who drink, and triumphantly clinked champagne flutes after the state’s case was dismissed.
On the plus side, Ito has become a celebrated taliswoman. A little cheerleading posse of elderly women gathered on the street in Tokyo hailed her like starry-eyed devotees of a beauty vlogger. “I’m a great fan of yours!” gushed one of them. Me too.
Celebrities on the NHS Front Line
Japan’s Secret Shame