Tonight’s Breathtaking episode depicts a doctor slamming the Government for not locking down earlier, in one of its most political scenes yet.
In the final segment of ITV’s gripping three-part Covid drama, Dr Abbey Henderson decides to expose the horrors she saw during the height of the pandemic.
Days earlier the fictional consultant – played by Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt – is ominously warned ‘the NHS eats whistleblowers alive’ by a hospital executive who she confided in.
In the same episode, doctors are spat at and told the virus is a hoax by a group of protestors outside the hospital.
Breathtaking’s plot all happens through the Dr Henderson’s eyes at a city hospital in England.
Tonight’s final part, called Mitigation, covers from the end of November 2020 until mid-January 2021.
During this period, Britain went through a second lockdown, a failed tier system and was sentenced to a third and final lockdown.
An exasperated Dr Henderson is seen telling the hospital executive: ‘People won’t understand what they don’t see. They don’t believe hospitals are full. They don’t believe that this virus kills people and why would they.
‘Why isn’t anyone telling people what is actually happening?’
After contacting a radio station anonymously, the drama cuts to her taking to the mic in a studio to share her experience.
‘I have been a doctor for 15 year and I am seeing things at the bedside that I can never unsee,’ she says.
‘If I don’t tell the truth, I don’t deserve to be a doctor at all.’
But pressed by the radio host on why listeners should trust what she is saying, she unveils her identity and GMC number — a unique seven digit number confirming a doctor’s status on the medical register.
Dr Henderson adds: ‘I believe there have been deaths from Covid in care homes, in hospitals, in the back of ambulances, that resulted from locking down too late and incompletely.
‘Those people you speak about can and absolutely should come forwards and talk about their views and their experiences too.
‘But they cannot deny the reality of mine because if you get sick and you need a hospital bed then my reality is going to become yours.’
Such sentiments about lockdowns were held by many NHS medics and health experts in the pandemic.
Similar opinions were also shared by Government advisors, including Sir Patrick Vallance.
However, some evidence has since questioned the effectiveness of blanket lockdowns, which crippled the economy and had devastating knock-on effects on the NHS and other sectors of society.
In a taxi later that day, Dr Henderson receives a call from an unknown number, reportedly an executive at NHS England, known as Robert.
‘I wonder how your CEO will feel about that interview,’ he says. ‘I’m also wondering what the GMC will think about it Abbey.’
Prior to the fallout of Dr Henderson’s interview, the episode lays bare the consequences of Covid misinformation.
Picking up on November 24, 2020, the drama opens with Dr Henderson being anonymously filmed in a hospital corridor and forced to call security after the masked man refuses to stop. Instead, he tells his camera the building is empty.
As the situation darkens, archival footage of the Queen is shown urging Brits to come together and stay ‘united and resolute’ to overcome the virus.
But walking out of hospital entrance just weeks later, Dr Henderson is faced with dozens of angry Covid deniers screaming in her face.
‘Go to Nuremburg you scum,’ one poster-wielding protester shouts. ‘Murderous b****’ another yells, before spitting on the medic.
It mirrors scenes captured during pandemic.
On New Years Eve 2020, hundreds of people convened outside St Thomas’ Hospital in London to protest the ‘Covid hoax’ and lockdown measures.
In another example shared on social media in January 2021, a group of people were ejected by security from a Covid ward as one of them filmed staff, claimed that the virus was a hoax and demanded that a seriously ill patient be sent home.
The incidents at hospitals and their aftermath on social media were described by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) as ‘a new phase in the weaponisation of misinformation’.
Hospital bosses and police chiefs also warned lives were being put at risk and the care of patients disrupted by channelling hatred against NHS staff.
Elsewhere in the episode, colleague Dr Ant Vyas, a medical registrar, struggles to convince his mum in an emotional video call not to absorb misinformation on the Covid vaccine shared on social media.
She tells her son she worries about its safety and how quickly it was made, while neighbours who have told her hospitals are now empty plant seeds of doubt in her mind on Covid’s danger.
Breathtaking is adapted from a memoir of the same name, authored by NHS palliative care doctor Dr Rachel Clarke.
It is co-written with Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah, best known as an actor, most recently as Martin Bashir in The Crown. Both are also former doctors.
Clarke said their rule while writing was to put nothing in the script that didn’t happen somewhere in real life.
The Oxford-educated former journalist, who retrained as a doctor in the late 1990s, hopes the series, criticised as being a polemic that ‘forgets storytelling in favour of politics’, helps NHS medics who worked through the pandemic ‘feel seen’.
In the run-up to the episode’s release, Froggatt said: ‘In November and December 2020 they were seeing an influx of patients and much younger patients than before. Suffering and dying from Covid.
‘Having to deal with death on that level every day and be so overstretched that you’re making impossible decisions.
‘Then walking out of the hospital having to face abuse from Covid deniers who maintained it was all a hoax.
‘Going back to a grim hotel room, going to bed, getting up and doing it all again in extreme circumstances.’
She added: ‘It doesn’t take much to imagine what that would do to your mental health. The fury that would ignite in you.
‘Filming those scenes of Abbey facing abuse, people calling you a liar, makes you feel so angry and betrayed on behalf of the NHS workers.’
Breathtaking episode three airs tonight on ITV1 at 9pm.
