User:Janey1888/sandbox

Film and Television
Film and television have played important roles in forming cultural understandings of the National Health Service. Hospitals and GP practices, in particular, have been repeatedly dramatised as locations that lend themselves to displaying wider life stories - love, birth, ageing, dying, friendships and feuds. The NHS has also been an important topic within public health, often forming a central part in public information films about health and wellbeing.

Public Information Films
From the launch of the National Health Service in 1948, film was used as an important cultural tool for spreading governmental health messages. During the Second World War, film grew in popularity as a way for the British government to keep citizens informed, impart advice and help raise morale on the Home Front. This commitment to producing public information films continued after the end of the War in 1945 with the newly formed Central Office of Information taking responsibility for the production of these films. This ensured that the launch of the NHS was accompanied by a number of public information films shown nationwide during Spring and Summer 1948. Three main films were produced - Charley: You're Very Good Health (Halas & Batchelor, 1948), Here's Health (Douglas Alexander, 1948) and Doctor's Dilemma (Unknown, 1948). These films introduced the NHS in three distinct ways with Charley: You're Very Good Health focused on explaining how the NHS would work upon its launch in a light-hearted manner with Charley standing in as the 'everyman' within the film's narrative. The film used a series of 'suppose' scenarios to outline how the new NHS system would work in practice in comparison to the pre-NHS health care system. Here's Health instead employed the narrative techniques of melodrama to dramatise one family's response to a household accident and the sudden need for medical attention during the Christmas of 1947. It uses flash-forwards to show how these type of care and the cost of it will be altered by the introduction of the NHS. The third main film used to advertise the launch of the NHS was a much briefer, information short, centred on the use of voice-over and a combination of still and moving images to encourage members of the public to register with an NHS GP before the National Health Service Act came into force on the 5th of July 1948.

Popular Films and Television
Within a few years of the NHS, popular fictional films were beginning to focus on the NHS as a location for dramatic narratives. Films such as White Corridors (Pat Jackson, 1951) and Mandy (Alexander MacKendrick,1952), shown within the early years of the NHS, showed day-to-day life in an NHS hospital as well as dealing with specific single-issue topics such as deafness within postwar British society. The Doctor series, starring firstly Dirk Bogarde and later Leslie Philips, took a comedic look at a the antics of a young doctor in an NHS hospital and the Carry on ... comedies, Carry on Nurse (Gerald Thomas,1959), Carry on Doctor (Gerald Thomas, 1967) and Carry on Matron (Gerald Thomas, 1972) also used comic situations within the NHS hospital to poke fun at both the NHS as an institution and the capers of doctors, nurses and patients alike. From the late 1950s, the NHS also became an important subject within the wider history of British soap operas. Emergency Ward 10 was first broadcast in 1957 on ITV and ran until 1967 and followed the life and loves of the staff and patients of the fictionalised Oxbridge General. ITV later followed this up with General Hospital which borrowed much from Emergency Ward 10 in terms of its themes and focus. The idea of a medical hospital as a suitable and popular setting for a soap opera continued to take root in the 1980s. Casualty, set in an A&E department, was first broadcast in 1986 and has since become the longest running medical drama in the world. At a time when controversy over the NHS was high on the public agenda, Paul Unwin and Jeremy Brock began their proposal for Casualty by declaring that ‘In 1948 a dream was born: a National Health Service. In 1985 the dream is in tatters.’ This politicised agenda remained in evidence during the first three series of the Casualty, with the programme showing how those who fictionally worked for the NHS were also dissatisfied with the new direction of the Service. During the 1990s television began more overtly showing medial practitioners who were critical or cynical of the NHS. In particular, Cardiac Arrest was broadcast on BBC 1 utilised this type of cynicism within its narrative plots. Television has also forged a place for the NHS within reality television programming. In particular 24 Hours in A&E and One Born Every Minute have adopted medical documentary formats to show the inner workings of particular NHS hospital departments. Fly-on-the-wall footage is interweaved with interviews with patients, staff and relatives as they give their perspectives on the medical cases shown in each episode.