Chilling tale of a killer GP that’s truly NHS history, warts and all
John Bodkin Adams is not a name to freeze the blood, not like Fred West or Dennis nilsen, or even harold Shipman. But Dr Adams, it appears, may have killed twice as many as all of them combined, and got away with it.
his grim story was almost an aside in The NHS: A People’s History (BBC4), the first of a three-part documentary both celebrating 70 years of the health service and wallowing in its scandals. Adams was an Eastbourne doctor in the Fifties who burrowed into his patients’ affections, and persuaded them to change their wills or simply give him cheques.
his friendship was frequently fatal. It’s thought he killed as many as 160 patients, with his lethal prescriptions. But fellow doctors rallied round when he was charged with murder, and such was the exalted social position of GPs in the early days of the nhS that he was acquitted.
Within five years, he was practising medicine again. he died in the early Eighties.
Presenter Alex Brooker chatted briefly with the granddaughter of one victim, a wealthy socialite, and then changed the subject, to tell us about hip replacements.
The story of Dr Adams has been largely ignored for decades. Viewers
DULL FARE OF THE NIGHT: Versailles (BBC2) used to be a dreadful mess — melodrama, soft porn, arthouse and clunking soap in one dollop. But now it’s none of those, just a slow historical re-enactment. I liked it better when it was awful.
with microfiche memories might remember a TV play about the case in 1986, starring Timothy West and written by Richard Gordon — better known for his comical Doctor In The house novels.
other than that, it appears that John Bodkin Adams continues to get away with it.
Despite the scattershot approach, this show kept our attention with well-chosen, concise interviews. We met a lifelong demo marcher who has decorated her loo with placards backing the nhS, and a doctor who qualified on July 5, 1948 (the day the health service was launched), and went straight to work as an anaesthetist: ‘It was chaos. We were lumbered with doing things we weren’t capable of doing.’
Alex lost his way slightly when he turned to inter-racial love affairs on the medical soap Emergency — Ward 10. he didn’t seem to realise that it was fiction. Perhaps he subscribes to the Millennial belief that anything in black-and-white must be Proper history.
And he hooted with laughter at round nhS spectacles. I don’t know what he thought was funny
— they might look like they belong in The Beano, but I bet there are swanky opticians selling very similar pairs for £400.
A very different documentary gave us an insight into U.S. immigration policy, as we watched consular officers granting and denying visas at whim on Inside The American Embassy (C4). With a former reality TV
host now running the country, there is potential for these applications to be turned into a gameshow. You’ve seen Britain’s Got Talent — now play America’s Got Visitors.
In such a show, viewers could call premium rate lines to decide who gets visas.
We saw a convicted thief who wanted to take his daughter to
Disneyland (he got in) and a Pakistani millionaire who claimed he wanted a few days of high-rolling in Vegas without his wife (he was turned down).
Then there was the Jamaican immigrant desperate to see her 28- year- old American daughter — they were estranged, but the young woman was dying from cancer (approved and no problem).
not so the child molester who had served five years for gross indecency, but now wanted to see his dear old mum on her 80th birthday ( no visa and no surprise).
A tasteless idea for a game, of course. But this made engrossing TV.