Palliative care doctor and writer Rachel Clarke talks to Gaby Hinsliff about Breathtaking, ITV's harrowing new drama about life as an NHS doctor during the pandemic.
Desperate as she was not to infect her husband and two children, the virus wasn’t the only thing she was trying to scrub off. ‘You were trying to wash away what you had experienced that day, so you had a little bit of time that was pure, that wasn’t contaminated,’ she explains.
‘When my kids would tell me about going on a bike ride with their dad for the daily exercise, I couldn’t feel the fun and the joy they had, but I could – almost at one removed from it – by them telling me. And I didn’t want that to be contaminated by what I was seeing.’ insisting there’s no need to panic with fictionalised scenes depicting the horrific reality in hospitals, where frightened nurses are making PPE from bin bags. Although its central character, Dr Abbey Henderson, played by Joanne Froggatt, is a composite made up of different doctors’ experiences, her children are roughly the age of Clarke’s own .Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah, both former junior doctors themselves.