The National Health Service on Television

This timely volume explores the close relationship television has always had with the National Health Service. Taking a chronological approach to examine the multiple ways in which TV has presented the NHS since the 1950s, the chapters delve into key moments in television history and how they reflect and shape our view of public health.

These chapters span the key moments in television history which deal with this subject in many forms, from the 1960s soap opera to the 1970s hospital comedy to the cosy “NHS as heritage” offered by Call the Midwife, via the melodrama of shows like Casualty and the gothic hospital dramas of Jed Mercurio. Beginning with the early dramatisations of the NHS wards, which reflected storylines that combined romance, illness, and sometimes death, the book then shows how, over the years, the depiction of NHS doctors, nurses, and other staff as heroic and romantic has been countered with dramatisations of the impact of austerity cuts, hospital mergers, and competition from the private sector.

This book will interest students and scholars of television and media studies, the history of television, the medical humanities, cultural studies, gender studies, and in the growing area of narrative medicine.