Britannia Hospital (1982) Testing the Nation’s Health (Review)

The Mick Travis trilogy of films which began with if…. in 1968 and continued with O Lucky Man! in 1973 concluded in 1982 with Britannia Hospital. It was a film that also effectively ended the career of the director, Lindsay Anderson, as near-universal critical condemnation saw its release amputated by Thorn EMI, who hurriedly withdrew it from cinemas early into its run. At Cannes, British critics walked out in disgust, hurling abuse at the screen as they departed. A review appearing in the NME from Richard Cook said “I left the showing of Britannia Hospital filled with hatred for a film besotted with a callous futility.  Anderson’s venom didn’t seem to stop at the enfeebled grandeur of the institutions Olde England still cherishes dear but foreclosed on the existence of anything worthwhile remaining in the human spirit…. Savage satire or selfish disgust?”

Yet, on the other hand,  the film found defenders in the shape of Dilys Powell, Geoff Daniel and David Robinson who each listed it as one of their films of the year. What both the staunchest critics and supporters of the film alike can agree on, however, is that Anderson’s film didn’t capture the mood of the nation, or at least the mood the nation wanted to see. 1982 was a time of renewed patriotism, as a result of Thatcher’s jingoistic adventures in the Falklands had proved. British audiences did not want to see a film that told them the country was going to the dogs, they’d heard enough of that in the 1970s, when David Sherwin’s script was first developed. Argentinian audiences, however, perhaps understandably given the war, made it their film of the year in 1982.

For me, however, Britannia Hospital is a coruscating and blackly comic satire. It’s a film that is not without its flaws, I grant you, but it has its finger on the pulse of the nation as it was then, and perhaps still does. The film tells the story of the titular hospital, on the day that a new wing is to be officially opened by the Queen Mother, referred to throughout the film as ‘HRH’. Unfortunately, it proves to be a rather chaotic and eventful day. A succession of demonstrators are vehemently protesting against an African dictator who is a private patient at the hospital. Ancillary workers are picketing in the grounds in opposition to the gastronomic demands the VIP patients are imposing on their menu. A widespread bombing campaign engulfs the capital from an unnamed group of terrorists, leading to casualties reaching well into the hundreds that threatens to buckle the emergency department. And Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), now an investigative reporter, is shooting a clandestine documentary on the hospital’s eminent surgeon, Professor Millar (Graham Crowden) and his Genesis Project, which is highly dubious and much shrouded in secrecy. As the events of the day unfold, all the characters with their wholly disparate elements will come clashing together at the dawn of a new and unpredictable age for mankind itself…

The origins of Britannia Hospital began in 1975, just two years after the release of O Lucky Man! Anderson had become interested in the battle lines being drawn between left and right in Britain’s workplace. The 1970s were a time when unions were at the peak of their powers (the National Union of Mineworkers having effectively toppled Ted Heath’s Conservative government in 1974 when he foolishly chose to call an election based on who really runs the country, the government or the miners) and Anderson came across an article regarding industrial action at Charing Cross Hospital against their private patients. “This immediately struck me as absurd,” Anderson explained to the New York Times when publicising Britannia Hospital in 1982. “If you stand outside a hospital and stop ambulances going in in the name of humanity you are involved in a wonderfully absurd paradox”.  Anderson was also intrigued by what he viewed as the hypocrisy inherent in those who claim to stand for the working class, pointing out that the union leader involved in the hospital dispute, a lady known as Granny Brookstern and, in his own words, the Labour Minister of Health (presumably Barbara Castle, who was Secretary of State for Health and Social Services between 1974 and 1976) had both been treated privately in hospital.

In coming to write this article, I cannot find much trace of this Granny Brookstern who presumably served as the basis for Joan Plowright’s Phyllis Grimshaw, the wonderfully matriarchal trade unionist in the film. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Robin Askwith’s Ben Keating (last seen as one of the public schoolboys in if….) is based on Jamie Morris who, during the Winter of Discontent of 1978-’79, led a militant work-to-rule and strike action for a pay-rise of between 10 and 20% for staff at Westminster Hospital, just a few minutes walk from the Houses of Parliament. Like Keating, Morris was a long-haired and charismatic NUPE shop steward and domestic supervisor, who represented members in the cleaning and non-medical care team at the hospital. He was also a local Labour councillor who dreamed of one day standing for parliament and had been a student of industrial relations at the LSE. But prior to all this, Morris had actually been a staunch Conservative – could this explain why Anderson and Sherwin chose to bring back – alongside Travis and Biles – Keating and perform an about-turn that made him an estuary-sounding militant union rep? When newspapers began to report in January how Morris had brought Westminster Hospital to such a standstill that it could no longer admit any new patients, not even emergencies, they had found their bête noire. “What is left of the moral capital that the miners drew on in 1972 and 1974 has been squandered by the likes of Mr Jamie Morris” a Standard editorial screamed, alongside their front-page headline of “Sabotage Hospital Calls Army”. This referred to hospital administrators having to call on help from soldiers at a local barracks to remove two hospital delivery vans whose tyres had been slashed from the service entrance when appeals to ambulancemen, the police and even the AA had failed.

Whilst the paper could not name those responsible for blacking the deliveries and slashing the tyres, they made clear the link with Morris by placing his photograph beneath the headline and a picture of the vans in question. In March, Morris gained further notoriety when the David Ennals, the Labour Health Secretary was surreptitiously admitted to the Westminster by the back door with recurring thrombosis. Declaring Ennals a legitimate target and blaming him personally for the pay dispute, he promised that the MP’s stay “would be made as uncomfortable as possible”, telling the Daily Mail “He won’t get the little extras our members provide for patients. He won’t get his locker cleaned or the area around his bed tidied.He won’t get tea or soup. He won’t see a single smile”. In the second week of March, following crisis talks with Morris, the TUC, hospital management, ACAS and Ennals himself, dressed in his pyjamas, the government conceded to a 9% pay rise and an official review at a later date. For some staff, Morris had betrayed them and he received death threats in the post. Like those who felt aggrieved by Morris, the film depicts Keating as being ultimately bought off by management in the shape of Leonard Rossiter’s Mr Potter, to the tune of a seat at the top table next to HRH.

Keating of course isn’t the only character to return in this closing chapter of the trilogy. Graham Crowden’s Millar had previously had a run in with McDowell’s Mick Travis in the picaresque O Lucky Man! whilst Brian Pettifer’s hapless Biles appears in all three films and arguably gets his biggest role here as Potter’s right-hand man. Many actors from the previous films return (Peter Jeffrey, Dandy Nichols, Vivian Pickles) albeit playing different – though somewhat similar – characters. The character of Potter the hospital administrator was actually written for Arthur Lowe, who had starred in the previous two films, but the Dad’s Army actor was too ill to undertake to the lead role (he passed away just a month before the film’s release) and opted instead for a small cameo as an MP on his deathbed (Ennals?), leaving Rossiter to handle the more significant part.

It’s a film packed full of familiar faces including Fulton Mackay, Jill Bennett, Marsha Hunt, Richard Griffiths, Liz Smith, Brian Glover, Ram John Holder, Tony Haygarth, Robbie Coltrane and, as Travis’ video technician there’s Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill! Look out too for small roles for Alan Bates, TP McKenna and Michael Medwin and, although there’s a cast here that stretches to over 100, with 70+ speaking parts, see how many times you can spot the actress Elizabeth Bennett; by my reckoning, she plays at least three separate and equally minor roles. To the delight of Anderson, who viewed the film as a parable, filming took place in at Barnet’s Friern Hospital, an operational psychiatric hospital where patients would mingle with cast and crew. The budget was extremely tight, with Anderson lamenting that the money ran out long before the filming schedule was completed. As a result, star names such as McDowell and Hamill worked solely for their expenses rather than a fee.

Whilst audiences do not necessarily need to have seen if…. or O Lucky Man before Britannia Hospital, there’s a satisfying through-line for audiences who have. For example if… took its name from Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the same name, the lyrics to the main theme for O Lucky Man, whose score is sung in-vision by Alan Price throughout the film, open with “If you….” (“If you have a friend on who you think you can rely, you are a lucky man/If you’ve found a reason to live on and not to die, you are a lucky man”) in clear homage to Kipling and a call-back to the previous film, and in Britannia Hospital the consequences of Kipling’s famous words – “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs” – are made painstakingly and blackly clear for Mick Travis. Of course, whereas the time was right for anti-establishment commentary in the counter-culture era of the ’60s that if… found itself in, taking potshots at patriotic, Kipling-esque England seemed less attractive to audiences keyed up by the victory in the Falklands. For the Argentinians, the film provided some comfort and afforded them to laugh at the absurdity of their colonial foe. France was also a big fan of the movie, our Gallic cousins often finding the humour in our national identity and traditions, whilst the US were also more favourable; Rex Reed calling it “The MASH of socialised medicine” whilst Vincent Canby went one further and proclaimed it to be Anderson’s “best film to date”

Upon completion, the film was entered into competition at Cannes where it suffered the ignominy of the aforesaid walkout from British critics. Some even expressed objection at what they perceived to be bad taste on Anderson’s part for keeping the late Arthur Lowe’s cameo in the film, given that his character collapses and dies on screen. The reviews for the film were brutal and became something of a cause célèbre; flooding over to front pages where one publication raged “Cruel Britannia – would any other country stand for a film that portrays us all as mad?”. The point of Anderson’s film – that the satire of Britannia Hospital could and indeed should be directed at any country; as evinced by Polish auteur Andrzej Wajda who, in a letter to Anderson, praised it as “the best Polish film I’ve seen in a long time!” – appeared to have been missed, though changing the film’s title from Memorial Hospital to the more on-the-nose Britannia Hospital,  perhaps did little to help matters.

Nonetheless, the point was at least recognised by Alexander Walker who reflected that “It’s British setting in a London hospital, Anderson’s metaphor for a sick Britain suffering a nervous breakdown, hasn’t stopped practically every nationality present at Cannes from recognising and applying the truth of its savage comedy to the conditions of their own ailing countries” Anderson could take some comfort from the likes of Walker, and the aforementioned Dilys Powell, Geoff Daniel and David Robinson all understood and praised his movie, but he still felt bruised by the whole experience. Tackling Milton Shuman’s criticism that the film’s ending was “undergraduate tosh that provides an unnecessary pretentious note to a film that has enough humour, imagination, daring and fury to survive it”, Anderson rebuked that “The film ends with a question mark, not a solution, and people don’t like that. They want to be let off the hook, and this film impales the audience on rather a large hook. I think that if we are going to find solutions, we’re not going to get any help from God, or any pre-sold political notions. The big question remains whether we are good enough or intelligent enough to survive”

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Anderson, as an ageing enfant terrible of British cinema, knew that his films were challenging and confrontational, and wanted them to be. If…. had mystified audiences with its swapping from colour to black and white in 1968, whilst O Lucky Man! continued to defy expectations by stretching to a bum-numbing three hours. Anderson knew that the film, as he said in a letter to Pauline Melville, one of its stars, was “designed to annoy practically everyone”. Here we can see the peculiar paradox within Anderson, both as a person and as a filmmaker. He wanted to plaudits that many of his contemporaries received from the establishment as they were accepted to their bosom, but he equally never wanted to make things easy for them. As Brian Pettifer remarked “He made a lot of enemies, never won a BAFTA. People have long memories. He alienated people – he was never short of saying what he thought of David Lean, for example. It doesn’t help to make enemies in this business” That said, the invective language of reviews from supposedly youthful publications like the NME, papers who ought to have been more sympathetic to rebellion, must have stung and surprised Anderson, and the film’s mismanaged press and promotional tour, combined with EMI’s cowardice, placed him further in the doldrums. Twelve years separate  Britannia Hospital and Anderson’s death in 1994, and in those years he made just a handful of films, including the concert film for the boyband Wham’s tour of China. Britannia Hospital had removed him of any semblance of good faith within the industry and a projected fourth film featuring Mick Travis, set at a reunion for the old boys of if…. was sadly not forthcoming.

As a fan of Anderson,  I have to say that whilst I like Britannia Hospital very much, I don’t hold it as dear to my heart as the previous instalments in the trilogy. I don’t think the main issue I have with the film is its satire as such, either. Many complain that it is simply too broad, but that’s not necessarily without its appeal. Granted it is a little dated now but, just like its intention to point the finger at the ills of whatever country it is seen in, Britannia Hospital is a film that has the insight (or foresight) to still find blame and absurdity in the events of the present day. The cripplingly powerful, zealous unions and any rightful claim to a voice that the British workforce may have once had has long gone (swept aside by Thatcher in a miners’ strike that the violent policing of the demonstration seen here effectively predicts) but the ineffectual bureaucracy of management and government remains. Watching the scene in which the visit takes in the new state of the art hospital ward, only to find the sterile and impressive space utterly empty (because of a shortage of cleaning staff), actually put me in mind of the current situation with Coronavirus, with testing centres and hurriedly built Nightingale Hospitals remaining vacant. The reason seemingly just so that the government can boast about capacity, and to hell with the ordinary hospital departments and care homes that are buckling under the strain. No, my issue with Britannia Hospital is that Anderson takes no prisoners whatsoever. Everyone is attacked with equal venom; the trade unionists are corruptible and the workers are feckless and idle. The management are cowardly and spiteful.

The establishment are out of touch (HRH’s office is represented by the broad but comically effective pairing of the dwarf actor Marcus Powell, dressed in an Edwardian morning suit, and a Thatcher-like drag turn from John Bett) and the media, as represented by McDowell, Hamill and Frank Grimes, are little more than muckrakers and pleasure seekers. Somewhere in the middle of it all are the people, en masse but mostly silent; shafted by the machinations of others or beaten to the ground by Fulton Mackay’s merciless police force. There is, in fact, no one that audiences are expected to identify with. At least in if…. audiences could side with Travis and his rebellious youth who rise up against the stultifying, banal cruelty of the establishment. At least in O Lucky Man! audiences could sympathise with Travis as he, a modern-day Candide, is routinely cheated and attacked until there’s simply nothing to smile about. But in Britannia Hospital, there is no one. Travis is barely even in it and, in the end, unable to keep his head. Is it any wonder then that Professor Millar believes mankind to be redundant?

Released to Blu-ray for the first time this week, the Powerhouse Indicator label delivers a crisp high-definition remaster of the film with extras that include interviews with Robin Askwith, Brian Pettifer and the film’s editor Michael Ellis. Image gallery and trailers are also included and the package is rounded off with a 40-page booklet including new writing on the film and interviews with Sherwin and Anderson, excerpts from the latter’s diaries and an overview of the critical responses.

Thanks for reading our review of Britannia Hospital

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