Breathtaking Monday—Wednesday 9.00pm ITV1
Doctor turned whistleblower Rachel Clarke recorded the reality of life in the NHS during the pandemic in a shocking memoir. Now, with Jed Mercurio, she’s telling her story on screen
RACHEL CLARKE’S PANIC attack came in January 2021. It was just over nine months after the Government called the first UK lockdown and only days before the publication of her Covid memoir, Breathtaking.
She was driving to Horton General Hospital in Banbury, Oxfordshire, where she was a palliative care doctor, when she had to pull over to the side of the road, her heart racing. “My body started rebelling and I couldn’t breathe,” she recalls.
She knew what was happening but could do nothing to stop it. Since March 2020, she’d offset the trauma of long days on the Covid wards by spending time with her husband and children – and the “nocturnal therapy” of chronicling her daily experiences into what would become her third book.
Now Clarke has turned that memoir into an ITV1 drama, with the help of another former doctor, Cardiac Arrest and Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio. Everything in it really happened, they promise of this nightmarish freefall into the relentless grind endured by the frontline NHS workers for whom we gladly clapped and banged our saucepans during lockdown. A sobering caption at the end informs us that an estimated 60,000 of them reported Covid-related PTSD in 2021.
Over three episodes, viewers see Dr Abbey Henderson (Joanne Froggatt) and her team leap from one crisis to another. Zoom funerals, PPE shortages and lack of hospital beds, operating on colleagues, patients’ relatives refusing to wear masks… all this was experienced first-hand by Clarke or related by peers and friends still practising medicine to Mercurio and the third co-writer on the series, actor Prasanna Puwanarajah, who is also a former medic.
Writing wasn’t part of Clarke’s plan when she embarked on her medical degree at Oxford in 2001, aged 29. When she qualified as a doctor eight years later, Clarke says she thought she had “completely eradicated” her past life as a broadcast journalist, in which she’d produced and directed documentaries on al-Qaeda and the Iraq War for Channel 4.
We have former health secretary Jeremy Hunt to thank for her change of heart; specifically, a 2015 headline that read “Jeremy Hunt goes to war with doctors”. “I was aghast – it felt like we were being attacked by the Government,” she recalls. “But I had these journalistic skills I could use to fight back.”
Media appearances soon brought a book deal. Fast-forward to May 2020 and Clarke was pouring into her writing her ri
