In the mid-90s, having found myself on a hiatus from
surgeries where huge chunks of my bowel got hacked out, and having survived
giving birth to a very small boy, I was writing quite a lot for radio. A
producer asked if I had any series ideas, and I came up with Trust; a satire on
the NHS. Remember satire? It has a
long history, and was still alive and well during the Tories’ last, endless
reign, and then it seemed to disappear. It’s not gone exactly, I think it just
hides, masquerading occasionally as drama, when we’d expect it to be
comedy. Certainly, we have to look
a lot harder to find it. The dictionary describes satire as ‘the use of wit,
especially irony, sarcasm and ridicule, to attack the vices and follies of
humankind’. I think we’d all agree that’s a good thing.
Anyway, I digress – whatever satire is or isn’t, and whether
it is or isn’t represented adequately on television or radio today, is not my
point. My point is the story of
Trust. The simple premise of Trust
was that a corrupt hospital manager was brought in to do a kind of top-down
reorganisation of the hospital he was charged with running. Sound familiar? Maybe so, but bear in
mind the first series went to air in 1995. This nonsense of which I wrote was
made up. Silly. Satire, with the emphasis on the ridiculous.
An aside, at this point. I, like many other leftie types,
have often acknowledged that Labour was to blame for the first wave of the
ludicrous amount of managers, without any medical knowledge or expertise,
brought in from the business and industry worlds to take charge of the NHS and
its treasures. However, looking
back at Trust - which I wrote, but clearly don’t remember all that well - I
have to accept that that’s wrong. I’m wrong. All of us who admit to Labour’s
part in starting the regime that is now becoming the end of the NHS, are not
quite right. I was and remain no
Blair fan, and he did definitely make things worse on that score, but clearly –
and apologies for sounding like Cameron in reverse - the Tories started it. I
may have had my own vision of where it was going, but I certainly didn’t make
up NHS trusts and hospital managers. I extrapolated from what was there. And it
was put there by the Tories.
It wasn’t the greatest writing in the world, I don’t
imagine. It was quite knockabout with scenes of total lunacy at times. The basic premise was that the hospital
manager – played by a brilliant actor, whom I won’t name, because I never do in
this blog, but it’s easy enough for you to find out – met up every week with
the managers of other hospitals to bid for surgeries; the hospital offering the
cheapest deal got the operation and the aftercare that went with it, and made
their profits from that. Our evil
manager took to undercutting the other hospitals on surgeries for patients who
might not make it through their particular procedures, then didn’t do the
surgeries and ‘let them’ die. The
relatives were told their loved one had died on the operating table, and our
‘hero’ made the hospital finances look good, whilst pocketing a nice chunk of
change for himself. He managed to
blackmail enough of his staff for the scam to work, and from that seed grew a
whole series with, as they say, hilarious and horrifying consequences. Hopefully. Certainly, the reviews were good, including
– and this may well have been the highlight of my career so far – one in the
British Medical Journal, which was
quite long, complimentary in parts, and ended with the warning that such a
hospital manager as the one I’d invented may well turn up at the reader’s place
of work any moment. (You can read a bit of it here.)
Back then, some of the things that ended up in the series I
thought were completely ridiculous. There were drug companies bribing staff to
use only their products; we had wards running out of syringes and dressings and
having to make deals with other wards to get the apparatus they needed. When I was in hospital in 2010 I saw
that actually happen. Only it
wasn’t syringes or dressings, it was giving sets, which are used to give
patients fluids intravenously. There weren’t any on the ward and they had to
swap something they did have with another ward to get them, so that patients
waiting for iv fluids could get what they needed. In Trust, we joked that the NHS would become all about
money.
Happily, a second series was commissioned, and we had to
come up with a new scam. This time
we went with organ harvesting.
Illegal organ harvesting, where patients were kept alive, when that
wasn’t exactly their care plan, and their organs harvested without the
relatives’ consent or knowledge, and before they knew their loved one was
‘dead’. The organs were then sold
on, and again, our hospital manager and his accomplices profited, despite the
accomplices’ many attempts to bring the whole situation to a halt. None of this sounds funny, I realise
that. Back then though, it did seem crazy and impossible, and led to the
requisite jokery its time slot demanded.
And then, halfway through the airing of series 2, Trust was
pulled. There was to be an
election that year, you see, and the BBC couldn’t be seen to be transmitting
anything that may influence the way that election would go. Infuriating, obviously. Stupidly
complimentary in a way; the merest suggestion that my writing could be that
powerful. That someone lying in a
late night bath would hear my words coming from the mouths of wonderful actors
and think, fuck me, I’ve voted Tory all my life but I’m not going to any more
because of this comedy, satire thing I’ve just half listened to. That they
would then wash their armpits with renewed vigour and a whole different take on
life, thanks to our little late night show. Nonsense, of course. But it happened. Which was okay, we thought. The producer and I, both of whom had
grown to love our programme and all who worked on it, worried slightly that
listeners would be doing other things over the summer when the series returned.
Things like going on holiday, or spending balmy nights in their gardens
listening to music, rather than words. We needn’t have worried, though, because
Trust never did return. I still
have a letter somewhere from the then controller of Radio 4, telling me that
now that Labour had got into power, the destruction of the NHS was no longer a
concern. Not a worry. It would all be fine now, because
Labour were in charge. I did
honestly sneer back then; I’d like to think it was because I didn’t believe it;
because I knew Labour under Blair was nothing like the Labour of old, but it
was a long time ago and I might just have been cross that I wasn’t going to get
another series.
Fast forward 15 years and my son, 20 years old, is at the
wrap party for an indie film he worked on. Coincidentally, and somewhat age
highlightingly, the director’s mother and I had worked together in an
advertising agency a hundred years ago, and our children – I’m not even going
to think about how old this tale makes me feel - were talking about said coincidence with a couple of the
actors. One of the actors is dating the son of the brilliant actor who played
my evil trust manager, and my son tells this actor of this similar coincidence.
My son tells her his mother also worked with her boyfriend’s father. On a radio
series about the NHS. She looks at him, and says, ‘It wasn’t Trust was it?’ My
son confirms that it was, indeed, Trust, and she tells him that her boyfriend
plays it to her often, citing it as his father’s finest work. Which kind of brings the whole story
into a nice circley thing, makes me feel very old indeed, and gives me the
comfort of imagining that if I ever write something about kids in their 20s, I
could probably get a couple of this country’s most promising young actors to be
in it.
I don’t know if
Trust was that actor’s finest work; certainly I’ve seen him be
extraordinary in many things, but I’m just happy that somebody who knows a lot
about him would think that it might be.
I occasionally worry that it may end up being my finest work, but l
should probably talk to a therapist about that.
I’d love to have another crack at a satire on the NHS. I’d
love to revive Trust, if I’m honest, and find out what these characters would
be getting up to now – older, wiser, and way more experienced at the evil they
can do. Now with added legislation
to help them, and influential people happy to turn a blind eye in return for a
favour or two. I’m not sure I
could come up with anything more outrageous, more horrific, less compassionate,
than what is actually happening, though.
I’m quite sure I never would have dreamed that responsibility for
universal health care would no longer be a government duty.
I’m not sure if we can save our NHS. I am pretty sure it
will never be the glorious thing it was when our generation was growing up, and
I seriously doubt our children will get healthcare free at the point of use for
the rest of their lives. I fear for people who, like me, have chronic illness
and use the NHS and its services on a daily basis. For the terminally sick, the disabled, and the old. And never would I have imagined that
such an important institution would slip through our fingers so quietly, so
unnoticed, so unreported as it is. (See a an excellent overview of what is happening here, by committed campaigner, Marcus Chown)
We have to keep fighting, protesting, signing petitions,
writing to MPs, screaming at Cabinet Ministers, doing whatever the hell we can
to halt the demise of our NHS. I
hope we can. I hope we will. I know it’ll take a lot more than a bit of
satirical radio.
