CfP: The National Health Service on TV
July 5, 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of Britain’s National Health Service. Its creation spearheaded by Labour Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, the NHS was, according to him, “the biggest single experiment in social service that the world has ever seen”. Within a decade of the NHS’s inception, television was dramatizing the NHS wards, recognizing the appeal to viewers of storylines that combined romance, illness, and sometimes death. The first medical soap opera, Emergency Ward 10 (ITV 1957-1967) has since been followed by such series as Casualty 1(986-), Dr. Finlay (1993-96), The Royal (2003-2011), and now on its 12th season, Call the Midwife, to name just a few. But the NHS has also been the subject of comedies and reality TV shows (Only When I Laugh (1979-82); 24 Hours in A&E (2011-); One Born Every Minute (2010-18), for example). Over the years, the depiction of NHS doctors, nurses, and other staff as heroic and romantic has been countered with dramatizing the impact of austerity cuts, hospital mergers, and competition from the private sector (for ex., This Is Going to Hurt (2022-)).
This edited collection will examine the multiple ways in which TV has presented the NHS since the 1950s. We welcome chapters on documentary, period drama, reality TV, and soap opera, in which the NHS and its staff is the focus, in fictionalized and real-life scenarios. Chapters on TV programmes that are less well documented are especially welcome (i.e., we cannot accept more than one chapter on Call the Midwife). We welcome contributors from the fields of TV/Media Studies; British History; Medical Humanities; and more.
Please send a 500 word abstract by July 15 to
James Leggott, Julie Taddeo and Katherine Byrne.
Previous collections by the editors include: Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Period Drama (Manchester University Press, 2022); Conflicting Masculinities: Men in Television Period Drama (Bloomsbury, 2018). We typically work on a tight schedule: once abstracts are accepted, drafts are due within 3 months, with publication within 18 months- years.
Authors are responsible for securing copyright permissions for any images used in their individual chapters. We recommend using screen grabs to avoid this problem.
Dr. Julie Anne Taddeo.