NHS doctors too busy to care about patients, says Bodies creator

The writer behind the TV hits Bodies, Bodyguard and Line of Duty has said medical dramas do not show how cynical and jaded doctors are in real life.

Jed Mercurio, a former doctor who created the cult medical series Bodies, said hospital doctors were often too busy to deeply care about their patients.

“A lot of medical dramas still work on the idea that someone comes into a very busy hospital, and alongside their medical problem, they receive a talking cure about their family and emotional problems from the doctors,” Mercurio said.

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But as “anyone who has ever been in hospital knows, they don’t care and they don’t have the time”, he said, as he received an award at Mipcom, the world’s biggest entertainment market, in Cannes.

Mercurio said TV writers don’t want to portray the “cynicism that starts to infiltrate your work as a doctor when human suffering becomes quite banal to you”. He added: “A lot of medical dramas still show doctors to be very idealistic, and very invested in the patient’s wellbeing, not just in terms of the medical process.”

The Emmy winner made his name with the 1994-1996 BBC medical drama Cardiac Arrest, which was voted the most realistic hospital drama by British medical professionals. Mercurio then created Bodies, first aired in 2004, which he adapted from his own novel. The hit show returned in its entirety on BBC iPlayer.

Mercurio said he was inspired to start writing because dramas were “very unrepresentative of what was going on in our health service”. Despite his efforts, the myth of the empathic, idealistic doctor has remained.

“The way that the medical profession was portrayed on TV played a big part in me choosing to be a doctor,” Mercurio said. “I was seduced by the myth of the glamour and then found it was very different.”

Mercurio was working as a hospital doctor when he replied to an advert in the British Medical Journal looking for a specialist to advise on the script of Cardiac Arrest. He was initially an anonymous adviser on the show before he began writing the scripts himself.

The writer, whose father was a miner and factory worker, added: “I had never written in my life. It was not something that was open to people of my background or the school I went to.”

Mercurio said when he was creating the police corruption drama Line of Duty, the British police force he approached said they “did not want to get involved with anything that showed police officers making mistakes”.

He said senior police officers were obsessed with PR and some were in denial of problems within their institutions. “A lot of very senior police officers go on public platforms and say, ‘We don’t do the kind of things that are depicted in the show’.”

He continued: “But at the same time we can produce news stories that show that not only did police do that, but they actually did it themselves.”

While Line of Duty was fiction, Mercurio said: “If you did a genuine police corruption show it would always be about police officers wanting to make money out of their position.

“Occasionally it is also because they are lazy and they can’t be bothered to investigate a case properly.” He added neither was the case on Line of Duty.