Doctor Rachel Clarke and ex-junior doctors Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah have teamed up to make Covid drama Breathtaking, here’s the trailer.
It is perhaps no surprise that following the most tumultuous, traumatic time in our recent history, writers quickly opened Final Draft and began to try to make some sense of it all.
Jack Thorne’s astonishingly powerful film Help, which starred Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham, shone a light on the brutal reality or running a care home during the pandemic.
Michael Winterbottom and Keiron Quirke aimed their anger at the political side of things, with Kenneth Branagh playing Boris Johnson in mini series This England, while writer Stephen Knight and director Doug Liman took a more lighthearted approach with comedy drama Lockdown, which saw Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor stage a diamond heist in Harrods.
Jed Mercurio is no stranger to medical dramas, drawing on his experience as a junior doctor to script his first series Cardiac Arrest in 1994, which starred Helen Baxendale and Andrew Lancel.
In 2004, he wrote Bodies, a dark drama dripping in cynicism about the internal politics within the hospital starring Max Beesley and Patrick Baladi. After taking some time away to write five series of the hugely successful Line Of Duty and to date one series of The Bodyguard, in 2015 he wrote the tense, real time medical thriller Critical, which starred Lennie James.
Mercurio has now co-written Covid drama Breathtaking with Doctor Rachel Clarke and actor Prasanna Puwanarajah, who also began his career as a junior doctor, based on Clarke’s 2021 memoir of the same name. Craig Viveros directed the series.
The series aims to show the harsh reality of frontline doctors and nurses in the early stages of the pandemic.
Joanne Froggat stars alongside George Georgiou, Lucy Montgomery and Georgia Goodman,
Breathtaking, which comprises three episodes, will be broadcast on ITV from 19th February.
Watch the trailer below:
