Joanne Froggatt stars as the acute medicine consultant in the ITV drama. <\/p>
Breathtaking, a new three-part ITV drama, explores what really happened inside UK hospitals when the COVID outbreak first took hold \u2013 and the months following, as medical professionals scrambled to protect their patients against impossible odds.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But while the conditions she\u2019s operating in will be intensely familiar to swathes of doctors and nurses in Britain and beyond, is Abbey a real person?<\/p>\n
Dr Abbey Henderson isn\u2019t a real person, but she\u2019s based on Rachel Clarke, the doctor who wrote Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic<\/a>, the 2021 memoir on which the ITV series is based.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cA lot of my experiences of COVID are channelled into the writing of Abbey, her character, her journey,\u201d said Clarke, although Breathtaking<\/a> \u201c<\/span>covers a much longer period\u201d than the book.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen 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],\u201d said Clarke, going on to e<\/span>xplain the reasons why.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201c<\/span>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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cAnd 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 \u2013 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n