Dramatising Health Care in the Age of Thatcher

Wilson, Sherryl

doi:10.7227/cst.7.1.4

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…So too did G. F. Newman in his novel The Nation's Health, which was turned into a four-part television series on the new Channel 4 in 1983, albeit with a different set of targets for why medicine could make people worse rather than better. 40 In the longer term, writers moved back from this brink of critiquing not just the conditions under which the NHS operated but its underlying biomedical objectives and approach. Instead, those anxious about the implications of Thatcherism for the welfare state rallied to the cause of defending the service against cuts and the prospect of a more radical challenge through the introduction of markets and privatisation.…”

Section: Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It may have been a negative for the government presiding over the ailing service, but in the long term such a series confirmed and helped further to cement the NHS as a national institution. 43 The limit for permissible critique was again pushed close to its boundary in the writer Jed Mercurio's NHS-set Cardiac Arrest, which aired in three series on the BBC from 1994 to 1996.…”

Section: Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

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Representation of the National Health Service in the arts and popular culture

2022

Posters, Protests, and Prescriptions

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Section: Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

Representation of the National Health Service in the arts and popular culture

2022

Posters, Protests, and Prescriptions

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“…Social policy and the meaning of 'the public' on public services and broadcasting during the Thatcher years and its impact on TV drama in 1980s Britain, has been well documented so will not be rehearsed here (Holland 2013;Wilson 2012). However, some context will help to situate A Cream…”

Section: Tv Drama In 1980s Britainmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Life Review and the (Alternative) Politics of Ageing

Wilson¹

2017

Journal of British Cinema and Television

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Referencing Diana Athill's memoir, Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter (2015), this article organises an analysis of the BBC television dramas A Cream Cracker under the Settee (1988) and She's Been Away (1989) through the frame of Robert Butler's concept of the life review (1975) which, he argues, is a process through which unresolved conflicts and past experiences return to reflective consciousness, thus enabling resolution and recalibration of relationships and past events in the elderly. Viewed in the light of Butler's ideas, Athill and the 75-year-old female protagonist of each narrative suggest rarely depicted levels of agency and ongoing identity formation in the elderly. Although very different in tone, aesthetic appeal, narrative structure and class location, each drama similarly explores the inner lives of elderly women and reveals personal truths hitherto unacknowledged by them which also offer a reflection on wider society. In each case, the elderly protagonist can be seen as a subject in process with an identity formation that does not end in late life, while the life review also works to lift the veil between the dominant culture that largely wants to deny processes of ageing, and therefore death, and the lived experience of those undergoing the process.

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“…Jacobs points to the miniseries The Nation’s Health (1983) as symptomatic of a broader post- M*A*S*H turn towards politically charged depictions of the struggles of frontline healthcare workers. Furthermore, interrogating media depictions of British healthcare under Thatcher including The Nation’s Health , Wilson (2012) highlights its searing critique of government policies that she argues are shown disenabling the 1980s NHS. She also invokes an apposite and timely comparison between the excoriation of the Thatcher-era NHS in The Nation’s Health and the inflammatory and condemnatory findings of the public enquiry into events leading to the 2009 Stafford Hospital and Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust scandals, conclusions of which appeared as the 2013 Francis Report.…”

Section: Medical Tv Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary medical television and crisis in the NHS

Hamad

2016

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Te

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This article maps the terrain of contemporary UK medical television, paying particular attention to Call the Midwife as its centrepiece, and situating it in contextual relation to the current crisis in the NHS. It provides a historical overview of UK and US medical television, illustrating how medical television today has been shaped by noteworthy antecedents. It argues that crisis rhetoric surrounding healthcare leading up to the passing of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 has been accompanied by a renaissance in medical television. And that issues, strands and clusters have emerged in forms, registers and modes with noticeable regularity, especially around the value of affective labour, the cultural politics of nostalgia and the neoliberalisation of healthcare.

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Dramatising Health Care in the Age of Thatcher

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Representation of the National Health Service in the arts and popular culture

Representation of the National Health Service in the arts and popular culture

The Life Review and the (Alternative) Politics of Ageing

Contemporary medical television and crisis in the NHS

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