The NHS: A People's History

The NHS: A People’s History is a three-part series presented by Alex Brooker for BBC Four, which tells the story of the NHS through the voices of the people whose lives it has affected, from its birth in 1948 to the present day.

In each episode, patients and staff from all over the country dig out and share their treasured mementoes to tell deeply personal stories that chart the highs and lows of the National Health Service’s 70-year history.

Episode one covers the first quarter century of the service and unveils a whole host of unique artefacts. We’ll see the graduation certificate of a doctor who only qualified on the NHS’s first day and yet was thrown straight into surgery…one of the last remaining roadworthy Invacars, a specialist vehicle adapted for disabled drivers that was handed out for free in the 60s…and even a tiny booklet listing a family’s expenditure on doctor’s fees, a stark reminder of life before the Health Service when every GP visit came with a charge.

Patients and staff tell their experiences of how the NHS was not immune from the prejudices of 1960s Britain. Actress Joan Hooley shares a copy of an episode of ITV drama Emergency Ward 10, where her role as a hospital doctor - who happened to be both a woman and black - sent shockwaves through society. We discover how a simple pair of earrings transports their owner back to a time in which draconian attitudes towards sex nearly cost her her life. And we see how an ornate mirror, and the mysterious death of its owner’s grandmother, casts a light on a British class system that allowed some GPs to operate with alarmingly little oversight.

But despite an ever more fractured society, a medical revolution was happening and as the decades progressed, it was clear that free access to medical care was dramatically improving the health of the nation. A leading orthopaedic surgeon reveals the ground-breaking device invented by an NHS doctor in the 50s which revolutionised hip replacement surgery, and the daughter of a GP unfurls an incredible scroll of records of every case of childhood disease he treated, fascinating primary evidence of the monumental impact of the nation’s first NHS funded vaccine campaign.

Publicity contact: CKS