This Little Life BBC2
ER C4
The Clinic C4
In her book, Illness As Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes about the way we attempt to understand illness using the metaphors of war, with the chronically sick invariably battling for survival against an invading army of disease. Sontag argues that 'the most truthful way of regarding illness - and the healthiest way of being ill - is one most purified of and most resistant to, metaphoric thinking'.
I first read Illness As Metaphor 14 years ago (while bedridden with what was then called M.E. and is now chronic fatigue syndrome) and it helped me to stop perceiving a baffling illness as simply an invading, debilitating force beyond my control. The book stayed on my bedside table for the next three years and, I'm sure, contributed to my recovery. Yet, like you, I not only still use the same old aggressive metaphors in relation to illness but also respond instinctively and emotionally to their use - if only, perhaps, because nobody has come up with better ones. BBC2's drama, This Little Life, told the story of a couple coping with the premature birth (at just 23 weeks) of their baby son, Luke. 'The first day is the most critical,' explained the consultant (Peter Mullan) to Luke's parents, Sadie and Richie MacGregor (Kate Ashfield and David Morrissey). 'The next few days are extremely critical. The next few weeks are very very critical. And after that it's just critical... But let's just see if we can get him through tonight.'
'Your son is such a little star because we had a battle on overnight, but we made it,' a nurse told Sadie the following day. Sadie stayed close to her son and started a diary for him ('Day 4: Today we watched as they had to put needles into your feet. You're being so brave. The days have become a blur but I'll try to remember as much as I can for you...') and as the days turned into weeks she remained claustrophobically closeted at the hospital, immersed herself in medical jargon, became dependent on (and manipulative of) the consultant and judgmental about the nurses. Eventually she was so at home in the premature baby unit she polished Luke's incubator and taped pictures to the side of it. As she became close to the mother of another premmy she also became estranged from her husband, who had necessarily been dragged back into the outside world. That Sadie's increasing selfishness was, quite understandably, on behalf of her helpless son didn't stop her from being a pain the arse.
In a pivotal scene, Sadie asked the consultant she had dubbed 'Dr Magic' how he coped with his job: 'Do you have a garden? Imagine it's a glorious summer day and you're watching a very healthy seven-year-old running around just enjoying life. A boy who doesn't even remember being here...' It was an image Sadie seized upon, creating for herself a fantasy Luke. She also started to hear the voice of her incubator-bound baby: 'Stay,' we heard him whisper to her - a scene which, in lesser hands, might have been laughable but here was scalpel-sharp.
Though she was assisted by Sarah Gavron's delicate direction and a script of wrenching understatement by Rosemary Kay (a deserving winner of the BBC's Dennis Potter award for new screenwriting), Kate Ashfield's portrayal of the occasionally terrifyingly wild and visceral emotions that define the maternal bond made Sadie equal parts girlish vulnerability and womanly strength, and therefore entirely plausible.
By the time Luke had recovered enough to come off the ventilator and was preparing to go home, Sadie's and Richie's marriage had nearly run out of oxygen so, reluctantly, a wrung-out Sadie left her son's side for the first time ('Mummy, where are you? Mummy, it hurts...'). Riven by guilt and anxiety, she suffered a sleepless night at home and the following day Luke was diagnosed with meningitis. The denouement followed Sadie's journey with the fantasy seven-year-old Luke, taking him to the childhood home he would never see and which allowed Sadie to know that he should be allowed to die, even as her husband (David Morrissey, floundering superbly in the wings) fought for the right for him to live.
Last week I wrote about Real Men, another drama in BBC2's new, very serious Wednesday night slot, which prided itself on being shocking, harrowing viewing. This Little Life was, in fact, every single thing Real Men aspired to but failed to achieve. Harrowing without being in any way exploitative, mawkish, gratuitously miserablist or plain tasteless, this was a perceptive and life-enhancing piece of television that could only have been conceived by women (and therefore might best be understood by them, too). And though it called upon all the predictable metaphors to drive the storyline, I can't recall them ever being more powerfully or subtly deployed. I'm extremely glad, however, that I didn't have to watch it while I was pregnant.
At the same time as This Little Life was aired, the first episode of the ninth series of ER hit the ground running on C4. Each season I expect the show to look as though it needs a shot of adrenaline just to make it through the working day - and every season I'm proved wrong.
In the first 10 minutes Dr Carter and Abby Lockhart were quarantined inside the ER due to the outbreak of a mysterious 'monkey pox' from the Congo, while Doctors Susan Lewis, Luka Kovac and Robert Romano grappled with a lousy elevator system as they struggled to evacuate a bunch of patients via a medivac helicopter on the roof. Surely somebody must have had a number for Kiefer Sutherland?
In the scene where Dr Romano lost his arm courtesy of a 'copter rotor, the quease-inducing slo-mo and the whup-whup-whup of the soundtrack meant that, gore-wise, this was right up there with the infamous Tarantino episode. Meanwhile Elizabeth Corday was in London, albeit a delirious-looking parallel universe of a London where everything was familiar but, at the same time, somehow not quite right. In order to give American viewers some cute location cues, Elizabeth emerged from Westminster Tube station (allowing for a shot of Big Ben) walked over Westminster bridge and, cleverly, arrived at a hospital located just south-west of Tower Bridge, pretty much on the site of Terence Conran's Pont de la Tour restaurant, if not actually on top of his fabulously appointed penthouse apartment.
When she wasn't busy being patronised by a cartoonishly horrible English consultant, Corday helpfully decided to spend a lot of time on the roof of the hospital so that we might enjoy the view and, just in case Big Ben hadn't been a big enough visual tip-off, help us remember that we were still in London. However, when Corday managed to conduct a rooftop conversation in which Tower Bridge manifested behind the heads of both speakers simultaneously (and no, they weren't standing next to each other), things got a little bit too Salvador Dali. For the majority of ER viewers not au fait with the London A-Z none of this will have mattered a jot, of course - but for the rest of us this was like taking a big hit of gas and air.
Anyway, Corday has been away from London for so long that, when she finally decided to return to Chicago, she went to Paddington station and boarded a very old-fashioned looking train to Heathrow. I guess we should be grateful that the producers hadn't chosen to shoot this scene on the Bluebell line in order to capture some of that authentic Old Englishe, Brief Encounter-style steame charme, but I'd like to draw Corday's attention to the existence of the Heathrow Express: a 15-minute journey on proper modern trains, conveniently located just a couple of platforms away from the one she was on. Let's hope she stays in the States.
If war can be used as a metaphor for illness, then what could be used as a metaphor for plastic surgery? How about that old board game, 'Operation'? The one in which you use the little plastic tweezers to remove the little plastic organs from the little cardboard person?
C4's The Clinic introduced us to a few of the predictable cardboard cut-outs who spend £250 million a year in Britain in search of surgery to boost their self-esteem. Carol, for example, wanted to boost her C-Cup to something Jordanesque, or 'as big as I can possibly have without looking silly, which is a DD or an E.' Of course she ended up with a couple of Scuds stuck to her frontage and looked even sillier than Clare Short.
