BEESLEY: "As I enter the building my reflection slithers over panes of glass.
"Windows reframe the sky into blue squares
"while my heels click on hard flat floors and echo off corridor walls."
Bodies was based on a novel that I wrote which came out in 2002.
I wrote the original because
I actually felt at that time that it would be very difficult
to get a medical series like Bodies on TV.
Just keep telling yourself, ''It's just a job.''
It's been 10 years since I practised medicine but a great deal of my reactions to things
are still very close to what they were when I was a doctor.
I really don't see things from the patients'point of view.
I really do see them still from the viewpoint of the staff.
And that's at the core of my writing about hospital life.
Nearly there.
The idea that things go wrong in hospitals on a regular basis is a relatively new one.
When I was practising medicine,
no one had really measured how often errors take place.
Nationally, one in 10 hospital patients is harmed through medical error.
-Not good. -That's why we need better PR.
One of the things we wanted to show in Bodies was the climate of fear in hospitals.
Do nothing.
It's just a sense that in this world
that if you do speak out or you're seen to speak out,
or seen even to be commenting or noticing these controversial things,
that puts you in a very vulnerable position.
What's the big secret in the O&G department?
-There isn't another Shipman at large, is there? -Not that I know of.
I think a big problem is that people try and put doctors on a pedestal.
And they feel that any doctor who makes a mistake
must therefore be incompetent and deserves to be punished.
And one of the intentions that we had with Bodies
in exploring when things go wrong and questions of competence
is to show that it's much more complicated than that.
I need to make a phone call.
The question often came up, how aware is Roger of his
supposed incompetence or what other people see as incompetent.
And I think he's aware that some procedures
don't go as well as they could or can,
but that's what happens in surgery.
I'm sorry, Chris. I've got a patient on the table. Hysteroscopic myomectomy.
And unfortunately we've perforated the uterus. The sucker's returning faecal material
so, I'm afraid, I think we must have inadvertently cut through the bowel.
When the show first came out,
I was absolutely delighted in all of their responses.
I mean, all the doctors, the specialists, the consultants,
all of them just said, you know, ''You guys have got it bang on.
''It's like really bang on.
''The most honest reflection of what's happening in hospital life today. ''
As I'm sure you're all aware, this hospital is now a 3 star hospital.
So we thought it'd be a good idea if you could promote this more clearly.
MERCURIO: I think that there are many doctors who,
in private, off the record, will talk very frankly about management being an organisation
which isn't helpful to patients' interests.
Or that they would talk about NHS restructuring.
Some job cuts are inevitable.
Staff cuts lead to a poorer service.
How can a poorer service enable us to achieve foundation status?
It just can.
I think that doctors are very cynical about the managerial side of things.
But actually to go on the record and make those feelings known
can be damaging to your career.
You're to be escorted off the premises.
You took a serving of coffee from the canteen without paying for it.
I don't recall any such incident.
I was there. It's all documented.
You're permitted to five minutes to...
To clear your desk.
The character of Tony Whitman, played by Keith Allen,
is someone who's grown as the series has gone on.
The character became more and more important to our understanding of hospital politics.
And also much more important to our understanding of the hospital hierarchy.
And we were very lucky with Keith's performance.
Yes! Wanker!
When the time came to do the second series,
Whitman became a much more important character,
a much more rounded character
who had his own stories and arcs.
Morning, Roger.
Hurley, to Rob, was someone that he initially admired, I think.
And wanted to learn from.
And he is actually, possibly, not a bad guy but he is an incompetent doctor.
I did hear a rumour in my local pub that they call me the Butcher of Brockley.
You're saying I'm not up to difficult cases,
but you're the one who's the fuck-up, Rob. Not me. You're the one who's having to move on.
Have it your own way, you twat.
MERCURIO: I was very keen with the character of Roger Hurley
that we didn't have a cardboard cut-out villain.
It seemed to me absolutely essential that he had positive qualities.
And that there was never any absolute black or white answer
to whether he was incompetent or not.
I've always felt that he does not believe he's incompetent.
It's horrible, this one-upmanship.
And it has nothing to do with treating patients.
But the reality is that
it's how we gain the power to do things the way we think they should be done.
It's a full-on emotional game of tennis, that, with Hurley.
And he had so much and has so much power over Rob
that he has to constantly swallow and just try to get on with it.
Rob, sorry, um... Didn't my secretary pass on the message?
I've invited James to assist me in theatre for the rest of today.
I think that he's just a bit bolshie sometimes, a bit bullish.
But, like Roger, his intentions are good.
-James, why don't you... -Sure.
If these guys weren't doctors and they were just chaps out on the street,
one of them would've tried to murder the other by now.
It was always my intention that the audience would be drawn into
trying to understand the character.
I promise you nothing will ever come between me being a loving husband and a loving father.
So that eventually, I think, that some members of the audience will...
Will feel some sympathy for him.
-You've got a fucking nerve. -What?
-Why won't you believe me? -Roger.
Bloody locum not turning up.
If I was in your situation, I wouldn't want to spend a minute longer here than I had to.
The relationship between Rob and Polly is interesting
because they effectually do the same job
and I've always thought that Polly was Rob's ideal partner.
Polly, I, uh...I think you're really quite fit
and I wish we could've done some shagging while I was here.
MERCURIO: Rob is someone who maybe is a bit of a commitment-phobe
and feels that someone like Polly is the kind of person that you would settle down with
and get married to and so forth.
-The thing that I said. -What thing?
-That shagging thing. -That thing.
Yeah, well, I, um...
Well, maybe it's true. We regret what we don't rather than what we do.
Whereas the character of Donna because she's much less reliable and she's married
and she's just much more volatile as a character.
By choosing a relationship with her
it's a way to avoid commitment because she's never going to commit anyway.
You're leaving, he's not.
At the end of the day, all that he wants to do is be a good surgeon, you know.
The flip side of that coin is, of course, the non-committal thing that he has with Donna.
So, that was another kind of circus going on in his mind.
Push!
-Keep pushing! -Come on, Diane.
It's coming, Diane.
There's something very, very basic about the biology of childbirth.
The baby has to come out.
That's it. You don't really need to know much more than that.
And there are only two ways it can come out.
(DIANE CRYING)
You don't need to be a doctor to know that a baby that has just been born
should be showing signs of life.
Why isn't he making any noise?
And the way that we shoot those things
is that we tend to shoot more material than we will use.
(BABY CRYING)
We tend to choose the bits where the babies look the best.
Because they're prosthetic babies, they're plastic.
And sometimes you can see that they're artificial and other times it's very hard to tell.
And those are the segments that we choose.
I mean, the prosthetics, we're starting to look at from the...
from the babies to, you know, the premature ones to the full-size ones.
Then to all the mother's bits
and doing a Caesarean section and going through all the layers, the muscles and the fibres
and the peritoneum and everything that's there, is there.
I'd been a little sceptical about whether the prosthetics
could reproduce the anatomy and the surgical look
that you have in childbirth and in Caesareans and so forth.
But, actually, it became very clear early on in doing the first series
that the prosthetics would stand up to the glare of the camera.
And after that, we really had the confidence to push things more
and show much more of the graphic medical procedures.
(WOMAN SCREAMING)
-Shit, you've inverted the uterus. -Jesus.
I was quite squeamish and didn't like the look of blood at all.
It used to really freak me out.
MERCURIO: Whenever we looked at things that might be controversial in Bodies,
we were always asking the question,
''Does that shot or does that sequence tell the story?''
It's great that we have great advisers on the set
who meticulously go through things inch by inch, basically,
and you then have to be absolutely saturated with all of the medical knowledge
and look as though you've been doing it for a long time.
When you've got such good writing, you can take the risks and not play just what's written.
You can try and find other things to bring to it as well
because the script will hold up.
It's really powerful, powerful stuff.