THE doctor behind a new ITV pandemic drama filmed in Northern Ireland has spoken to the Irish News about her experience of surviving on the front line, working with Jed Mercurio and building a new hospital in Belfast.
A palliative care consultant in London, Rachel Clarke has also built a career as the author of three Sunday Times bestselling books.
During the pandemic, she worked on Covid wards and witnessed the “chaotic” conditions where doctors wearing flimsy paper masks could only offer oxygen, infected colleagues died and patients would never see a human face uncovered by masks again.
Unusually, she started her career as a journalist before training as a doctor in her late twenties.
Following on from the impact of the recent ITV drama on the Post Office Horizon scandal, she is now hopeful that Breathtaking – which she adapted for the screen along with former junior doctors Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah – can affect audiences in the same way.
“What Mr Bates vs the Post Office showed is how powerfully a TV drama can make you care about an issue that you thought you knew about, but actually didn’t really live and breathe it in the way a drama can make you feel,” she said.
“The drama really takes you by the hand so that you’re immersed and see, feel and hear everything as it was to us at the time in this incredibly alien world of PPE and virus masks everywhere.
“I think it’s really important to see what actually happened. We’re now these four years down the line from the pandemic beginning and there’s been so much disinformation and dishonesty around what really happened.
“We had all the anti-vaxxers, the Covid deniers who claim that lockdowns killed more people than Covid.
“All of that’s absolutely nonsense to the people who were working in hospitals. They would never believe a word of that disinformation and I just believe it’s incredibly important to show that on screen.”
The three-part series stars Golden-Globe winning actress Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey) as Dr Abbey Henderson, a hospital consultant during the early days of the pandemic.
Rachel said her aim was to specifically show the NHS experience of Covid, ensuring everything depicted on screen was a “completely true and authentic” depiction of the type of experiences faced by staff and patients.
Archive footage of government statements, for example claims there was no shortage of PPE, are contrasted with the real-time reality on the wards.
“I think that’s a very important and powerful device, because it reminds the viewer of the world that they inhabited but it connects it to the experiences of all the doctors, nurses and patients.”
She remembers the “extremely frightening” experience of stepping on to Covid wards in the early days of the pandemic.
“We didn’t have proper PPE, we had paper masks and pathetic plastic pinnies,” she said.
“I’ve never experienced that before as a doctor, where all of your training and instincts are to go forwards and help your patients.
“But now part of you wants to move away because you’re scared of getting infected and bringing the virus back into your home and infecting your husband and kids.”
She said staff quickly started to catch the virus in hospital, with some ending up in intensive care and even dying.
“It was chaotic in an era where we not only had no vaccines, but no treatment at all. We had nothing but oxygen to give patients and it’s hard as a doctor to feel that impotent,” she said.
“I think the hardest thing was the barriers that the PPE put up between you and your patients.
“I realised very early on that anyone who came into the hospital and died of Covid, from the moment they arrived they were destined never to see a human face again because of the masks.
“Those kinds of realisations were just haunting, because that’s the opposite of the humane compassion and care that you want to be giving patients.”
On making the unlikely switch from journalism to medicine, she said in some ways it was an ideal preparation.
“In both cases, you have to be really curious about peoples’ stories,” she said.
“You have to want to know about them and build up a relationship of trust with a patient or an interviewee as a journalist.”
Preferring the “simplicity” of doing her best for one patient at a time, she has no regrets about her career change.
“From day one of medical school I just felt like I was doing the thing I was born to do, I felt like I’d come home almost.”
While many would understand if she was to hang up her stethoscope to write full-time, she said the compassionate nature of end-of-life care remains rewarding.
“Sometimes when you go to work in a hospital you almost have the collected works of Shakespeare under one roof, because there are so many people going through the best, the worst, the most frightening and exhilarating days of their life,” she said.
“You see the absolute best of human nature in the most, outrageous difficult circumstances. And I just find that an incredibly sustaining thing and it’s what gets me up in the morning.”
She described working with Jed Mercurio as a dream come true, watching a master of his craft translate the interior monologue of her book into a gripping on-screen drama.
“He was so collaborative and supportive but I think the best thing of all is that he was passionate about telling this story truthfully and accurately,” she said.
“He felt that we needed to do the NHS justice and show all of the ways that staff went the extra mile and really put themselves and even their lives on the line for patients.”
Creating the set of the drama’s fictional hospital involved converting three floors of a disused further education building on the outskirts of Belfast.
“It was incredible, right down from the scuffs on the walls from the ambulance trolleys, stains on the ceilings to the leaks from the sewage,” she said.
“It does not look like a glossy American miniseries hospital. It is authentically like the NHS, it was tattered and threadbare and worn out.
“Seeing literally hundreds of people build on hospital and be there on set as a huge team to bring it to life on screen was astonishing.”
Proud to share the key art image for @ITV's BREATHTAKING. @JoFroggatt captures so hauntingly the exhaustion, grit & shellshocked face that so many NHS staff wore.
— Dr Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) February 2, 2024
Transmission dates to be announced next week.#NHS 💙 pic.twitter.com/CRftdPOh9N
