Up to her eyes on Covid front line
Dubbed the next Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Breathtaking shines a light on the Covid crisis in our hospitals and stars Yorkshire actress Joanne Froggatt. Phil Penfold talks to her about the series.
AS one of our leading and mostloved actors, Joanne Froggatt gets sent a lot of scripts to read and she goes through them all meticulously – the good, the bad and the indifferent. “There are those which don’t interest me, others I don’t think would be suitable, and a few which grab my attention,” she says.
But none, until she was sent the screenplay for Breathtaking, made her turn the pages, astounded at what she was reading, and burst into tears. Would she accept the role of Dr Abbey Henderson in a new three-part drama?
You bet your life she would – and did.
“It involved me immediately and yes, there were tears on my cheeks,” she says quietly. “In the nigh-on 30 years that I’ve been performing professionally, nothing, absolutely nothing, has affected me so personally and so very deeply. I could see it all, in my mind, and so vividly. I knew that I had to do it. No question.”
The ITV series, which is shown over three nights on ITVX starting on Monday, is set in a fictional city hospital (it was actually filmed in a disused three-floor facility in Belfast) and follows acute medical consultant Henderson as she and her colleagues face up to the enormity of the Covid crisis, and their battle to save lives as the virus begins to overwhelm the NHS. Chronological news footage from the early months of 2020 is cut into the drama.
But the action is not make-believe because it’s based on a best-selling memoir by Rachel Clarke, herself a consultant who worked tirelessly on the front line through the pandemic. Clarke was so stressed at the end of shifts that she went home, when she could, and sat at her kitchen table, faithfully recording the unfolding disaster. “I just sat tapping away on my laptop, trying, and always failing, to make some sense of what I’d experienced,” she says. “In a sense, I suppose, it was very cathartic but it was all grotesque, and I wanted to make it public.”
The series is devastatingly candid about government and NHS management and policy failures, and there’s no doubt that it will affect viewers, and make a huge impact