Medicine and multimedia: Science, sense, and substance
Authors: Geoff Watts
Journal: BMJ (1998)

Body Story, Channel 4, Thursdays 9 00 pm

  It’s a pity that Channel 4’s medical series Body Story has appeared so soon after The Human Body, the BBC’s venture into similar territory. The irresistible temptation to make comparisons leaves Channel 4’s offering outgunned—visually, technologically, and financially. While Auntie could afford to hire Ennobled of Hammersmith and cart him to all sorts of exotic locations—from the top of an Egyptian pyramid to the bottom of a swimming pool—the producers of Body Story had to make do with actors playing such parts as football-loving construction workers and motorcycle couriers who are would-be pop singers.

It might have been better if Wall to Wall Television, the production company which made Body Story, had chosen a different title. Using the word “body” again invites those unfair comparisons and casts a shadow over what might otherwise have been seen as a modest but rather good series. Each of the six programmes sets the biology that it is describing in the context of a simple dramatised story: a motorcycle messenger catching flu through sharing a lift with a man who sneezes; a woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth; the foreman on a building site who is under stress all day, eats hamburgers at lunch time, and then plays himself into a coronary care unit through an impromptu and ill advised game of football.

These scenarios form a skeleton on which to hang the biological meat. And they do succeed in putting over some good insights into the way our bodies work. Pregnancy, for example, is explained in terms of a fetal takeover, with the mother to be as a victim of the scheming alien, which first exerts endocrine control over her physiology and then systematically exploits her body for its own interests. The misery of the flu-ridden motorcyclist is portrayed as the unavoidable consequence of a militant immune system that cannot avoid causing collateral damage. Predictably, but still quite fetchingly, certain phases of the struggle resemble the kind of computer games in which you might score 10 for potting a virus but lose points for accidentally destroying your own cells. The graphics here owe little to reality, with stylised images of antibodies, T cells, B cells, and, most engagingly, lumbering macrophages with an oddly obscene way of engulfing their prey. But they make the points.


The programme on heart attack begins with a slow and overlong prelude to the main event. But after the attack has happened, the pace quickens. The programme (like all the others in this series) uses the simple device of switching between parallel plot lines: in this case what’s happening to the patient as he’s whisked into accident and emergency and, down at the level of cells and molecules, what’s happening to the coronary arterial clot responsible for his predicament. There’s a build up of tension: will the clot busting drug do its job in time? It does, but, just as you feel you can relax, the heart goes into ventricular fibrillation. Here we go again .... 




All the programmes trade heavily on computer animations. Stills from these sequences of nerve, immune, muscle, and other cells in action are used to illustrate the book that accompanies the series. The point about animation is, by definition, movement; transferred to the page, the computer images become impressionistic and lose their impact. As a memory jogger for the films, they serve well enough; as images in their own right, they aren’t in the same league. To remind readers of the link between events in whole people and events in their cells, the book also uses black and white stills of the film’s dramatised sequences. But these too have the feel of visual wallpaper. The result is a volume that is lavishly but not enticingly illustrated. Never mind; its strengths lie not in its pictures but in its words. Each chapter follows the thread of the corresponding programme, but in more detail. (No comparisons possible with Anthony Smith’s book of the BBC series; I haven’t read it.) Author David Williams offers us lucid, readable, unpatronising, fact packed accounts of six aspects of human biology. Boxes add extra detail that is relevant but not central to the main thread.

I was uncertain how well Body Story’s approach would work in the last programme, on death. But it did. The trick of explaining our demise in biological terms, while not diminishing its profound emotional content, was handled deftly, calmly, and without any cloying traces of sentimentality. The choice of actor Norman Lumsden (better known as L P Hartley, fictional fisherman and devotee of the Yellow Pages) to play the dying man was smart, conferring an air of familiarity and reassurance on what for some elderly viewers will be understandably disturbing.

All in all, this series demonstrates that sober accounts of biology and health don’t need to cost the earth (or travel to its far ends) to make watchable, accessible, and informative television. What a relief to be reassured that the schedules still have room for something with more science, more sense, and more substance than some of the New Age paranormal claptrap that finds it way past the commissioning editors.