TV Scope:Fight for Life BBC 1, Mondays, 9pm
The BBC's series on the human body, Fight for Life, is the essence of worthy television. It's a documentary about how humans respond to sudden illness or traumatic injury at various stages in their lifespan.
We worry about the outcomes, sympathise with the characters facing life-threatening situations, we learn a bit about biology, marvel at the computer-generated effects and generally emerge better people for having watched it. The best bit is that all the characters featured and situations portrayed are real. In a fictional scenario, we may not invest the emotional outlay demanded.
In this, the second of the series, we follow the medical meltdowns faced by children and their stories of survival. One boy suffers complications after a heart transplant, another is having a serious asthma attack and the youngest has fallen on to a train track.
Nine-year-old James came from Ireland to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London for a heart transplant. The donor heart was on its way. But it was "a race against time"; the narrator told us as the donor heart could become useless if it was out of the body for too long. It was more than a little alarming to see James having his heart removed what seemed ages before the donor heart arrived, to save time. The wait is punctuated with audio of the conversation in the operating theatre as it would sound from inside James's organs, to disturbing effect. Finally, the heart arrives and all appears to go smoothly as it is "plumbed in" to James's system.
James succumbs to a candida infection in his lungs; a "disaster" for someone with a compromised immune system. His parents try to stay calm. This terrible time is illustrated with footage of James visibly deteriorating, cut with computer-generated graphics of the candida multiplying and fighting off advances of the body's own defence systems and the drugs. The undoubtedly sophisticated computer graphics give what appears to be a fairly simplistic version of events. In James's case, we watch evil-looking beans (candida) encroaching ever further into a bubble wrap sheet (lungs) and resisting various defensive splodge shapes (drugs or chemicals in the body). In the end, of course, a different type of defensive splodge enters through the bloodstream and kills all the beans. These graphics, despite the ultimately positive outcome, tend to reduce James's situation somewhat.
Aaron is also nine and having a potentially catastrophic asthma attack. This is a prime example of the body responding to something it perceives as harmful, through an allergic reaction. It's hard to watch the boy's distress as his system commandeers every available body part, heaving neck and shoulders in the attempt to breathe. At one point, he says: "I'm going to die."
Meanwhile, the computer graphics evoke the feeling of suffocation Aaron must be experiencing. Again, it's a little crude, but effective nonetheless.
Fight for Life has it all: it's innovative, interesting, exciting and educational. And yet, you have to wonder if the programme-makers need to work quite so hard to enhance the drama.
