A quick glance at social media confirms that everyone you know is strung out on Line of Duty, obsessing over just how deep cover John Corbett is, how bent Super Ted is and exactly who’s next to be riddled with bullets, hurled through a hospital window or barbecued alive. Wading through the hot takes and hysteria, you realise there just aren’t many shows more gripping. Implausibly though, and without fanfare, one has emerged from the same creator. Jed Mercurio’s medical drama, Bodies, first broadcast in 2004, is now available in its entirety on BBC iPlayer. If Line of Duty can reasonably be called not for the faint-hearted, Bodies should come with a hazardous material warning. It is the most bold and challenging story Mercurio has ever told.
Set on an obs and gynae ward of the fictional South Central Infirmary, Bodies follows new registrar Rob Lake (Max Beesley) as he realises that his consultant Roger Hurley (Patrick Baladi) is a dangerously incompetent surgeon with a high patient-mortality rate who is retained only because his research brings money into the hospital. Women die or suffer permanent injury because of Hurley, but while the research money keeps flowing in, a code of omerta prevails as management and medics form a protective shell around one of their own.
Lake must therefore tiptoe over laser beams as he figures out whom he can trust. Doctor Maria Orton (Susan Lynch) and ward sister Donna Rix (Neve McIntosh) know Hurley is a menace, but who will be brave enough to speak up? Threaten the golden goose and dark forces gather. Administrators pursue a three-star rating for the hospital and if they have to trample over a few bodies to get it, then so be it. We all know what happens to whistleblowers.
In Bodies, we see precursors of the themes that define Mercurio’s later work. He has always fixated on people behaving badly in dysfunctional systems. Much like Tony Gates in Line of Duty massaging his figures with “laddering”, senior surgeon Tony Whitman (Keith Allen) dodges any seriously ill patients in case they hurt his fatality figures. It takes the life-and-death stakes of Bodyguard then doubles them. The graphic high-tension surgery of Critical is cranked up brutally with botched procedures that make Dead Ringers look like Doogie Howser.
All of which may make you feel like this is one best avoided, the kind of worthy statement TV you watch out of duty rather than pleasure. In fact, it’s totally addictive. A brilliant seam of dark humour runs through the show, lightening the load considerably. The minutiae of hospital politics are enthralling and it does its best work in morally grey areas. Hurley, after all, is no moustache-twirling Harold Shipman figure. Even Orton concedes “(he) may be a good guy, he’s just not that good a doctor”. And even the good doctors have chalked up a decent body count in their time. It’s like Doctor Polly Gray tells an underling: “We all kill a few patients when we’re starting out.” The problem with being an upstanding doc ready to call out malpractice wherever you see it, is that everyone knows where your bodies are buried.
It is strange how a show named as one of the Guardian critics’ Top 20 of all time can be so little known. To this day, not many people have watched it. It premiered on an unfashionable channel, BBC Three, at a time before streaming services reigned, when no lifeline was thrown if network TV sent you to the knacker’s yard. BBC iPlayer wasn’t around to save Bodies first time around, but it’s making up for it now by platforming this forgotten masterpiece. Mercurio himself says: “Bodies remains the drama I’m most proud of.” If you missed it, you should rectify that. Yes, it takes the miracle of childbirth and turns it into a bloody creature feature, but don’t let that put you off. Nor should the suffocating claustrophobia, grinding despair or nameless dread disqualify it. One episode of Bodies will leave you an emotional wreck, but you’ll be back for more.
