An intimate insight into quiet medical heroism
The scenes from inside the hospital on Italy’s Frontline: a Doctor’s
Diary (BBC Two) were grim, of course. We are well-used to them now: doctors on the brink of exhaustion, both physical and emotional; patients struggling for survival. But it was the home scenes in this intimate documentary that brought you up short.
One set in particular: Dr Laura Bocchi, a doctor at the hospital in Cremona, northern Italy, tested positive for Covid and went into isolation. She had to quarantine in a bedroom while her husband and son remained on the other side of the door. To keep family life going, they ate while sitting on either side of that door, huddled on the floor with bowls of pasta. Sometimes mother and son would lay their palms on opposite sides of the glass, the closest they could get to physical contact. At one point, Bocchi rang her friend and colleague, Dr Francesca Mangiatordi, pleading for permission to step out of the room in mask and gloves, in order to hug her little family. Mangiatordi talked her out of it.
Mangiatordi was at the centre of the documentary, an A&E doctor with a gift for evocative language. “A month has passed and it feels like an eternity. But it could just as easily be an hour, a day, since it started,” she said in one of her video diaries, as the pandemic took hold. There were no available beds; patients lined the corridors on stretchers. The hospital was overwhelmed by the numbers of people needing oxygen “as though they were continually drowning”.
A 30-year-old woman came in with symptoms. We saw her panic as she spoke of her three children, the youngest of whom was just three. “The little one can’t live without me,” she said. Mattia, an 18-year-old boy, deteriorated so quickly that Mangiatordi feared he would not survive. But he rallied. It was a lump-in-the-throat moment when he was able finally to speak on the phone to his mother, who had not been allowed to visit him. His first words were: “Hi Mama. I miss you.”
The documentary was subtitled, but in truth you could have watched it without – the contents were horribly familiar. It was a testament to the quiet heroism of the doctors and nurses who put their own health at risk every day.
In reviving Alan Bennett’s Talking
Heads (BBC One) the BBC has found a series perfect for lockdown. No need to worry about the two-metre rule here, with a cast of one. But not all of them are perfect for the year 2020. Jodie Comer in Her Big Chance was the first misstep of the series. Here was Comer, actress of the minute, struggling with a script preserved in aspic. It just seemed plain odd to have Comer’s character, Lesley, talking about a “fork lunch” in an episode of Crossroads.
The dated feel wasn’t just in the little details. Lesley wore a pair of acid-wash jeans, anchoring the episode firmly in 1988 (when it was first shown), yet she spoke with an accent that sounded more from the 1950s. I get that she was playing an actress putting on an ‘actressy’ voice, which was gradually stripped away, but it was still not quite right. And then there was the central storyline, in which Lesley was cast in some sort of soft porn film. Sorry to say it, but the idea of soft porn now seems weirdly quaint.
Julie Walters was a decade older than Comer when she played this role in the original broadcast. She gave it pathos and comedy, beginning as a bubbly optimist; Comer played Lesley as mournful from the start, so there was little sense of the character being brought low.
Playing Sandwiches was more successful. Lucian Msamati played Wilfred the park keeper, although, where some of Bennett’s work has the element of unpleasant surprise – the truth about the family that lives over the road from Irene in A Lady of Letters, for example – Playing
Sandwiches signposted early on that Wilfred was a paedophile. All those references to “kiddies”.
Msamati did his best to keep things ambiguous for as long as possible, an unreliable narrator with a benign expression. But the final act also lacked the power of the original, in which the camera cut to David Haig’s bloodied face in his prison cell. In truth, these were never Bennett’s strongest monologues. Perhaps, by kicking off with the impeccable Imelda Staunton in A Lady of Letters, the BBC simply created an impossible act to follow.
Italy’s Frontline: A Doctor’s Diary ★★★★
Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads ★★★