Live theatre

IMAGINE the scene: an operating theatre where open heart surgery is being carried out. A phone rings. Hopefully, it’s a Channel 4 viewer wanting to speak to the surgeon and not a wrong number for a takeaway pizza.

The idea behind The Operation: Surgery Live, running over four nights on C4, may resemble a comedy sketch, but viewers will have the chance to speak with surgeons during each operation.

They’ll be able to interact with the operating theatre via microblogging site Twitter, as well as phone and email.

They’ll be able to speak to surgeons by phone at what are described as “appropriate points” during some operations.

The series begins with open heart surgery. Awake brain surgery, keyhole stomach repair and pituitary tumour removal will follow.

Things have come a long way since the BBC showed the first episode of Your Life In Their Hands, on February 11, 1958. This was one of ten live programmes illustrating current medical treatment. Three of these included surgical operations.

“By today’s standards, the avoidance of discussion of particularly disagreeable symptoms seems quaint, but at the time the series was a dramatic breakthrough,”

says Professor Chris Lawrence, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, at University College, London.

“In general, the public approved of the series, but conservative sections of the medical profession thought the programmes sensationalist and that they would foster hypochondria, or pander to morbid interest.

“Today, patients (or their lobby groups) consider they have a right to know what happens behind medicine’s formerly closed door. The medical profession also no longer assumes that it knows best and that patients need only be given the minimum information necessary to manage their condition and treatment.

“The broadcasting of operations that have already taken place is now quite common, further opening up medical practice to public scrutiny.”

In many ways, he sees Surgery Live as recovering the old idea of medical practice as a public performance – but with a difference. “Today it constitutes medical education and an attempt to dispel any ideas of professional secrecy that people may have,” he says.

“In the past, it wasn’t a public privilege to view an operation. It was an unspoken right based on the assumption that medical knowledge was shared by all members of the community and only medical skill and experience was exclusive to experts.”

The four-part series will be broadcast live to a studio audience at Wellcome Collection in London, as well as to TV viewers at home, from some of the country’s leading NHS hospitals – Papworth, Southampton General, Addenbrooke’s and King’s College Hospital, London.

“Surgeons routinely teach and talk observers through operations,” explains C4’s commissioning editor for science David Glover. “Now, for the first time, viewers will be able to interact with surgeons as they carry out life-saving procedures.

“We hope the series will de-mystify surgery, encourage discussion and help viewers to understand their own bodies, as well as showing the care, dedication and skill that goes into modern surgery.”

Heart surgeon Francis Wells, of Papworth Hospital, believes the more people understand and appreciate how their bodies work, the more they may look after their own health.

CLARE MATTERSON, Wellcome Trust director for medicine, society and history, sees the collaboration as an important addition to the Wellcome Collection’s events programme that has been built up over the past two years.

“We believe it is important to enable people to engage directly with the worlds of medicine and science,” she says.

Ken Arnold, head of public programmes at Wellcome Collection, sees working with TV as enabling them to take “this unique, inspriing and frankly breathtaking experience” to a far larger and more diverse audience.

“Medicine has, in fact, been conducted within the public domain for most of its history. Surgery and anatomy were originally developed in so-called theatres.

The trade of chemists was for ages strongly associated with show business.

And television listings regularly bulge with documentaries and dramas woven around medical and health themes.”

■ Tonight’s open heart surgery is followed by awake brain surgery (tomorow, 10.35pm), keyhole stomach repair (Wednesday, 11.05pm) and pituitary tumour removal (Thursday, 11.05pm).