Breathtaking review: This powerful but uneven Covid drama will knock the scabs off society's pandemic scars

It's a mark of memory that we keep certain things close to the surface – how to take a Covid test, for example – while the worst things are kept locked away, deep in some dark recess.

Breathtaking (ITV, Mon-Weds, 9pm) brought many of those nightmarish elements of the pandemic back to the surface.

A drama based on the book of the same name by NHS palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke, and written by Clarke with Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah, we saw the pandemic unfold through the eyes of Dr Abbey Henderson (Joanne Froggatt).

Clarke was a documentary maker before she retrained to become a doctor – later specialising in palliative care – and some of that story-telling skill is on show here, alongside the medical knowledge and first-hand experience of the pandemic.

Like a zombie movie, we see the first signs of the impending tidal wave – the static-y reports on the radio of ill people arriving from China, a first casualty on the ward, the first Covid patient “with no travel history”.

Meanwhile, real-life clips of the Government's response to the pandemic punctuate the scenes on the wards.

But we don't see much of that, the focus of Breathtaking is on the effects of that response on the NHS, its staff and its structures.

Much like the 'Covid hoax' campaigners we see in the third and final episode, it seems the higher-ups don't believe the evidence of their own eyes, or the warnings of the doctors on the frontline of the pandemic. Instead, they prefer to rely on the rules, the guidance from Government and Public Health England, guidance which was woefully underpowered and out of date by time it circulated down to the wards.

Time and time again, Abbey is told something can't be done because of the rules, because of the guidance.

“Every single trust has the same orders,” she's told when she queries the policy of sending the elderly and sick back to care homes. “Get 15,000 people out of the hospital beds right now and don't wait for negative tests.

“These are not my rules. These come straight from the top.”

To be honest, if your blood's not boiling by the time of the first ad break, you need a visit to the GP yourself.

Breathtaking is less a drama with a through storyline, however, than a series of short vignettes as we jump from patient to patient, crisis to crisis, each tableau highlighting an aspect of the pandemic.

We see the doctors watching a colleague's funeral on Zoom; a dying Covid patient's daughters – in party dresses 'for mummy' – arriving on the ward for a visit; a group counselling session where one nurse talks of drowning in bodies.

Each one is powerful, and an indictment of how the slow response of those in power failed us all.

But although we have Abbey to lead us through it, the bitty, chopped-up nature of each episode left you struggling to get a handle on it all.

You can't help wondering if the 'prestige drama' nature of Breathtaking conspired against it, and half-hour episodes following Abbey and one patient through the Covid experience might have worked better.

Ultimately, however, Breathtaking showed that the pandemic left its scars on us individually, and as a society. It eroded trust in politicians and scientists and left the people dealing with the day-to-day effects of the disease exposed and unprotected.

If Breathtaking knocked the scabs off some of those scars, painful though it might be, it will have done its job.