#QuestToSaveNHS, the teaser

On the day

By October 2016 WatMed Media was not just filming interviews, it was making trailers. #QuestToSaveNHS borrows the grammar of a documentary teaser, and opens with a small piece of continuity: the first line is a callback to Junior Jedi, “no days off, my young apprentice”, before cutting into new material. It closes on Nye Bevan’s own words about what it takes to keep the NHS alive, and the question the fuller documentary set out to answer. It is a small piece, 57 seconds, but it is evidence of the same instinct that runs through everything WatMed Media made: meet people with the format they already recognise from the media they actually watch, not the format a hospital press office would default to.

What it shows

This isn’t an interview, so there’s no line-by-line transcript below, just what could be made out from the auto-captions. It opens on the Junior Jedi callback, then a voiceover asks whether someone is trying to turn doctors and the public against each other. It cuts to a real interview subject, not yet named on this page, who says something close to: “over the last few years, things I’ve been told quite recently really opened my eyes: when a country fails to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, it also fails to meet the needs of the average citizen.” It then invokes Nye Bevan’s line that the NHS lasts only as long as there are people with the faith to fight for it, before closing on what reads as Kish’s own voiceover: “I intend to find out whether it’s a fight worth having, or just a futile quest.” It ends on a branded card: #QuestToSaveNHS.

Made by WatMed Media, October 2016; from the WatMed Media archive, my own upload.