People don’t need to be told of life’s pain
Doctor turned screenwriter Dan Sefton tells Emma Bullimore about his return to the NHS and his preference for feel-good drama
Doctors are a notoriously modest breed, but I’m still surprised by how lightly TV writer Dan Sefton takes his decision to return to emergency medicine. “It’s fine, I’m not exactly fighting the Battle of Britain,” he says. “My wife runs a sexual-assault referral centre, she was going to be seeing patients anyway. We both knew we’d be working.”
I first met Sefton in 2019, on location for series one of the BBC crime caper, The Mallorca Files. I interviewed him on a sunny Spanish veranda, just round the corner from the island’s glittering coastline. We’d been out for a couple of cervezas with the crew the night before, crammed round the last table at a lively spot lovingly referred to as “El Bar”. It was October, but everyone was still in summer clothes and British tourists were lapping up the last rays.
This was a far cry from the A&E department at Musgrove Park Hospital in Somerset, where Sefton had previously worked. But when the pandemic hit last year, he knew he had to return. “It was out of guilt, really,” he says. “A&E was obviously going to be busy and I knew I could do it – my clinical experience was quite recent. I texted my old boss, who asked me to come in on Monday.”
It had been a couple of years since Sefton, 49, hung up his stethoscope. At first, the father of three had been working at Musgrove Park part-time, while he wrote ITV’S The Good Karma Hospital and BBC One’s Trust Me, but screenwriting soon demanded too much of his attention. Series two of The Mallorca Files airs soon and he’s currently writing a fourth series of The Good Karma Hospital, which he hopes will shoot later this year.
Sefton’s brand of drama is upbeat and unpretentious. And while he missed the recent Casualty special, he tells me he has no ambitions to write a Covid series of his own: “It’s a terrible idea, people are completely fed up of it.” Instead, he likes “fun shows with a nod and a wink, which you can relax and enjoy.” The Mallorca Files is exactly that – detective duo Miranda Blake and Max Winter whizz round the island in a fancy car, teasing each other and never dwelling on the darkness of the crimes they investigate. You have the feeling that everything will be OK in the end.
“I don’t feel the need to create heart-wrenching drama telling people about how painful life is,” Sefton says. “They know that already. We’ve got loads of po-faced telly in this country that takes itself very seriously, but we’re not as good at producing feel-good comedy-drama. The Americans have always been great at those shows, like The Mentalist. My wife is a very intelligent, highly qualified doctor, who loves pastel-coloured romantic novels – she really enjoys them, and that’s fine! Not every book or TV show has to examine lots of issues.”
So how did it feel, walking back into the emergency department? “I was a bit nervous. I thought they’d start me off gently, but I was straight into treating Covid patients on hour two of the first day. I didn’t know what to expect, but there was no specific training – I was told to put the mask on, with the goggles, gloves and gown, and go into a separate room in A&E for a two-hour shift. It was hot and sweaty, but it wasn’t too difficult.”
Sefton has spent the past 10 months working a couple of days a week in A&E, witnessing the effects of the pandemic first-hand. These are the patients who, in a normal year, wouldn’t be in his care. “I’m seeing people who have been sitting at home with conditions for too long. It’s not patients who are obviously having a heart attack, it’s those who aren’t quite sure, who have stayed away from their GP because they don’t want to bother them. They end up coming to hospital in an ambulance after weeks of symptoms.”
For Sefton, the swell of patients dealing with mental health problems has been the most disarming. “I’m meeting patients whose lives are complicated by anxiety, stress and the inevitable consequences of isolation. One of the first people I treated had previously suffered serious mental health problems. They had been stable and coping for several years, but Covid triggered them again. These cases are very difficult to quantify – and it will be years before we really count the cost of what’s happened.”
Like the rest of Britain, Sefton has been watching the Government’s press conferences with interest. “I met Chris Whitty once in a bar – he’s a friend of a friend. Apparently, he commented that I swore a lot, which sounds like me after a couple of pints!” he laughs.
“It’s been quite hard to unpack what’s going on. I’ve been surprised by how many people seem to be very sure of themselves at these briefings. How can they be so confident? What we’re most afraid of is that the pandemic was essentially uncontrollable without a vaccine. Everyone has been flying blind. The lockdowns have been a toxic treatment that barely works. It’s like chemotherapy – just about working, but not very pleasant.”
I ask Sefton if he feels the NHS could be better resourced, but he’s more critical of the Government’s rhetoric than the lack of funding. “Arguably, we could have had a pandemic plan that addressed the need for surge capacity, but it’s complicated. The sad thing about this country is that we’ve been oversold the idea that the NHS is the envy of the world, but it’s not. It’s an incredibly efficient system and the people within it are great, but as a general population we have a rosy view of what it can actually achieve.
“It’s a glib quote, but someone said to me the NHS is a Ford Focus, which is a really good car, yet we’re constantly told it’s a Mercedes. Expectations are high – if you realised what great value-for-money it was, you might be a bit more sanguine about what it can actually do.”
While his TV career continues, Sefton tells me he’s keen to stay in the NHS after the pandemic is over. Even so, red tape could force him out. “As long as there’s a role for me, I’ll definitely carry on. It has been nice to be back. But it’s not easy to be part-time in the NHS. The General Medical Council’s revalidation process is inflexible and if you’re not fulltime you spend more hours on the paperwork than you do working. We need to make it more practical.”
Sefton’s deepest frustration is the approach to recruitment during this crisis. He knows former medics who couldn’t go back to work like he did. “I was only able to return so easily because I was on special leave from my hospital. Loads of people wanted to come back, but faced incredible amounts of paperwork and ridiculous demands. I know qualified nurses who volunteered but weren’t asked to help. If we had more staff, we could have potentially opened the Nightingale hospitals. They haven’t made it easy, or been very imaginative in getting people into the NHS who could help. It’s not hugely specialised work.”
‘The lockdowns have been a toxic treatment that barely works – like chemotherapy’
Series two of The Mallorca Files begins on Monday February 1 at 1.45pm on BBC One; series one is on iplayer. Series three of The Good Karma
Hospital is available on the ITV Hub