Joanne Froggatt stars as the acute medicine consultant in the ITV drama.
Breathtaking, a new three-part ITV drama, explores what really happened inside UK hospitals when the COVID outbreak first took hold – and the months following, as medical professionals scrambled to protect their patients against impossible odds.
Joanne Froggatt, best known for playing housemaid Anna Bates in Downton Abbey and starring in a string of crime and mystery thrillers, leads the cast as Dr Abbey Henderson, an acute medicine consultant.
But while the conditions she’s operating in will be intensely familiar to swathes of doctors and nurses in Britain and beyond, is Abbey a real person?
Is Breathtaking’s Dr Abbey Henderson a real person?
Dr Abbey Henderson isn’t a real person, but she’s based on Rachel Clarke, the doctor who wrote Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic, the 2021 memoir on which the ITV series is based.
“A lot of my experiences of COVID are channelled into the writing of Abbey, her character, her journey,” said Clarke, although Breathtaking “covers a much longer period” than the book.
“When I started to think about adapting the book into a television series, it seemed to me to be incredibly important to prolong the time frame [beyond April 2020],” said Clarke, going on to explain the reasons why.
“The second wave of the pandemic, which really smashed the NHS to bits in late 2020 and January 2021, was the most traumatic experience that NHS staff lived through. Secondly, it led to the most catastrophic loss of life, so we had the greatest single death toll in 24 hours in January 2021.
“And thirdly, and most importantly, I was very aware that the second wave had taken place in the teeth of fierce opposition on the part of the government to the advice the scientists were stating over and over again to lock down more quickly, more gravely, more significantly, in order to prevent avoidable deaths from COVID – and that seemed to me an incredibly important part of the story to tell because the only way in which a country successfully survives a pandemic is together.”
Clarke also explained the reason for setting the drama “on the ordinary medical wards of the hospital” rather than “primarily in intensive care”.
“That is actually where the vast majority of people had died from COVID inside the NHS,” she said. “And it is a largely untold story.
“People are very familiar with the idea that the epicentre of COVID inside our hospitals was intensive care. I would argue it wasn’t.
“There were many more patients with COVID on ordinary medical wards where they’d had very insubstantial PPE and often not the same degree of support that perhaps intensive care teams had, so I wanted Abbey to be plunged into this much less well known, much less talked about, part of the hospital – the ordinary medical wards where she actually had almost nothing with which to treat the patients.”
Clarke added: “She had oxygen, a paper mask, a plastic pinny and a pair of gloves. That is not much to face a deadly virus.”
Speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, Joanne Froggatt said: “I’ve been fortunate enough to play all sorts of characters, fictional and real life. Abby is a mixture of the two. She’s a fictional character, but in a real-life situation.”
She went on to say that much of the subject matter she’s explored in her work has been “challenging” and “an added weight”, but “this was tenfold because every single person in the world lived through this time”.
Froggatt continued: “We all have experience of this time, whatever your views on COVID are, whatever your views on lockdowns are, so that’s very unusual, to be looking at something that we all have a lived experience of and telling the story of this group of people. It was a huge responsibility.
“But I enjoyed the challenge of that, and I just was so focused on being the person to bring this to life on screen, to be the actor that gets the chance to do this. It was a real honour.”
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Clarke said that Abby starts out as “an incredibly principled, determined doctor who really wants to do her best for patients”, but quickly finds that she has to make difficult, uncomfortable decisions.
“Abbey is thrown into this maelstrom of pressures and tensions and traumas,” said Clarke. “She finds herself in a world that is alien, bewildering and at times doesn’t even seem to make sense to her. She is traumatised, frightened, she starts to become outspoken, she challenges authority, she is devastated at times, full of guilt and grief.”
But in spite of that, Abbey “finds her convictions about what really matters to her as a doctor wrestling with the global pandemic and goes on an astonishing journey to places, actions and behaviours she would never have imagined for a millisecond she might have been capable of before COVID hit her hospital”.
Breathtaking is available now on ITVX and starts Monday 19th February at 9pm on ITV1. Visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide or take a look at the rest of our Drama coverage.
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