Last night's TV review, Hospital (BBC2): How medical professionals face what the terrorists leave behind

Plus: Natural World: Supercharged Otters (BBC2)

St Mary’s Hospital staff were filmed on the day of the Westminster Bridge terror attack, and showed themselves to be remarkably dedicated, efficient and effective (BBC)

I hope you'll forgive this apparent media callousness on my part, but the makers of Hospital must have thought they’d had the most incredible luck when they found themselves at St Mary’s Hospital in London for the filming of their fly-on-the-wall documentary on 22 March – the day of the Westminster Bridge terror attack.

I stress again that is not to be flippant about the scale of the evil that was visited upon innocent people. It is merely to reflect on the media aspects of the outrage. On this occasion, by chance, the cameras were on the scene witness the suffering of the victims first hand, as well as the entry into the hospital of the first casualty, that being the terrorist himself, his bald pate being all we saw of him, being trollied into the care he didn't deserve but was going to get anyway. In the jargon of the trauma room he was soon officially as well as actually RIP.

I would go so far to say that this documentary of that day, though unplanned, was justified and in itself a form of defiance in the face of murderous extremism, and a graphic demonstration of the resilience of the human soul – and the much more tangible worth of the NHS’s major incident protocols.

The most affecting of the many emotionally charged moments was the reunion of best friends Yann and Victor, who'd come over on a school trip from France. They'd suffered serious injuries, including a collapsed lung, plus spinal damage and numerous broken bones, but were soon well enough to meet up in consciousness and to share a little French gallows humour. Their stories had relatively happy endings. So did Steven’s, a Londoner also randomly mowed down and lucky to have had his leg saved. Such have been the advances in infection control and orthopaedic surgery, we were told, that what would likely have been an amputation even 10 years ago could now be fixed up and sent off for physio.

Which brings us to the first of the two outstanding lessons of this unprecedented, if happenchance, access. First is that the CEO St Mary’s was justified in letting the TV people continue to go about their business sensitively and unobtrusively. This was a world away from the media organisations that impersonate friends or family members to infiltrate wards in search of a story or to take clandestine exploitative images of celebs or the victims of crime and terror. These being the same newspapers, by the way, that keep telling us the NHS is broken and needs to be scrapped.

Mind you, we did get a glimpse of the strains the service is under. At the start of the day’s filming, before the news of the major incident came through from the London Ambulance Service, the boss was chairing a discussion with senior colleagues about how they were going to fill the 699 – yes, that’s correct, 699 vacancies – St Mary's faces.

After that we witnessed the most incredibly effective and professionally dedicated display of action I, for one, have ever seen. Resources were allocated rapidly and intelligently in the face of the ugliest of circumstances. These St Mary’s people are extremely cool under pressure. Viewing this bloody, visceral but orderly reality of the aftermath of a terror attack was reassuring because the staff at St Mary’s weren’t the type of bungling wasteful idiots the press would have us believe populate the NHS, but incredibly efficient at finding the right beds for the right people in the right places in the right order.

Second. all the survivors agreed that one effect of their experience was a renewed determination to, as the French boys put it, keep their joie de vivre. Their lives found a new perspective, and we viewers too gained a fresh one, about dealing with terror.


 There are a number of surprises in ‘Natural World: Supercharged Otters’ 
 (BBC)

I’ll admit that I looked in on Natural World: Supercharged Otters in the hope that someone had attached one of the aquatic mammals to a twin-turbo V8 engine lifted from a Bentley Continental GT in an attempt to emulate Sir Donald Campbell’s attempt at the water speed record on Coniston Water.

Only joshing. I’m an animal lover, though I have to say that the otter never much excited me. I regarded them as little more than dogs that are very, very good at swimming. Supercharged Labrador Retrievers, if you will.

Anyway, wildlife cameraman and self-proclaimed “otter fanatic” (not a concept I’ve encountered before) Charlie Hamilton James changed my mind about all and I now realise are much more than supercharged mutts fond of fish. They’re super-predators, and very clever. They’re related to badgers, you know. Do you think they're supercharged too?