"Two Against 500" - Part One

Just had an exchange of emails with the BBC regarding the minutes of a 'programme review' meeting that took place in the autumn of 1996. Followers of the old @rfh1955 accounts will probably guess what the programme was but before I tell you what happened in that correspondence, maybe a personal summary of that programme is in order?

I'll tell you what - why don't I do this in two parts? The summary in part one, and the story of the emails back and forth between me and the Beeb (no names etc) twenty-seven years later in part two.

And 'yes', it's BBC1's "The Rantzen Report", transmitted on Monday 5th August 1996 at 7.30pm UK time.....

Dame (since 2015) Esther enters the set to a round of applause from the definitely not 500-strong audience (see newspaper clipping) and a generic TV theme tune for a 90s debate programme. Her intro is more or less what you'd expect on a topic like this in 1996 - mystery illness, controversial etc.

Even before the intro is over, Rantzen makes a beeline to the man who will turn out to be the panto villain of the piece, Dr. Thomas Stuttaford. When questioned, he says that it might be

"a group of symptoms which can give rise to physical, as well as emotional and mental illness”. Rantzen is a bit more blunt: “So you think it’s a type of depression?”, to which Stuttaford replies “I think it may well be a kind of depression”. This brings howls of disagreement from the audience (still not 500-strong, not even 498-strong). 

Starting the next sentence with “Patients will not realise…” doesn’t help the way Dr. Stuttaford is coming across.

Rantzen then turns to Jane Colby, a former head teacher and subsequent M.E. campaigner. She talks about her symptoms (sweating being one of them), whereupon Rantzen turns back to Stuttaford, asks him “Does this sound like depression to you?”, only for him to reply “Yes”.

Stuttaford then raises his voice in reply to Rantzen: “Now wait a second…here we see the typical patient who doesn’t understand that you get physical symptoms with depression…”

Going well, this.

Up next is Dr. Clare Fleming. She explains what she thinks is the difference between depression and M.E., saying she’s had both. After the views of a couple more patients, Dr. Charles Shepherd asks Stuttaford why do many patients not have depression, why do many patients have hormonal abnormalities and why did a recent trial of antidepressants on patients result in no real benefit to patients? 

Stuttaford answers by saying that often it’s those that were “overactive” that get depressed. He says that he would deal with Shepherd’s points “one by one” but he doesn’t. I cannot tell for certain if it’s the editing or simply him not answering but before we can hear any other answer, Rantzen moves onto Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick.

Now Fitzpatrick has an interesting background and I would suggest people search for his Wikipedia and Powerbase entries.

Anyway, Fitzpatrick doesn’t say terribly much other than he thinks the problem might be that people’s problems are being “relabelled in psychological and medical terms”. For somebody who went on to write for the deliberately provocative/tedious ‘Spiked’, he doesn’t seem to have much of an opinion on this. Well, thanks for the insight anyway, ‘Mike’.

Dr. William Weir picks up on Fitzpatrick’s (sort of) point but adds that the brain chemistry in M.E. is “definably separate and different” to the brain chemistry in depression but Dr. Sarah Myhill suggests that a cause for M.E. might be pesticide exposure.

After a run of doctors, Rantzen turns to Nigel Holbrook. Holbrook lost his wife, Ellie, after six years of illness at the age of 52. Ellie was a nurse and it is remarked upon by both Rantzen and Holbrook that nurses seem to be more at risk (this sounds somewhat familiar to the writer of this blog).

Holbrook: “Obviously you don’t die of M.E., you die as a result of M.E. and she died from a deep leg thrombosis for the simple reason that she was bedridden”.

Rantzen: “Did they try antidepressants…?”
Holbrook: “…those probably did more damage”

After another patient tells Rantzen that antidepressants didn't do any good for them, she returns to Stuttaford, claiming that if anything antidepressants make many patients (in this case) worse.

Stuttaford: "No, I think despite what Dr. Shepherd has said over this latest survey, earlier surveys show that an unexpectedly high proportion of patients who think they have M.E. do get better with antidepressants."

Rantzen then reveals the result of a poll of one hundred doctors. It turns out that under a third thought that M.E. was a physical illness.

We're now 10m 50s into the programme and this is when the programme gets a little more controversial. 

The next eight minutes and fifty seconds starts off with a young man called Peter telling Rantzen how he was told (by doctors) that he was school-phobic. Peter's parents were threatened with having their child taken away from them if he didn't attend school. When asked how he now feels about the episode, Peter tells Rantzen that he's angry at the doctors who diagnosed him as school-phobic.

Then Rantzen reveals a personal angle/conflict of interest to the audience. After an article in a paper about her ill daughter, Rantzen tells the audience that she received four thousand letters from "distressed patients and their families". Some of the letters described shock treatment for patients who were thought to be hysterical. This leads into a film about Michelle Golding, an eighteen year-old who remained ill after catching chickenpox. "She was treated in a hospital where they said her disease was all in her mind". Golding is asked about being put into a swimming pool by doctors. She says she was angry about it but chooses not to elaborate. However her mother, Maria Golding, goes into detail:

"They put Michelle into the pool, it wasn't a full-size pool, it's like a sunken bath, and she sank to the bottom, and she had very very long hair and her hair was floating out around her, her eyes were wide open, the bubbles were coming out of her mouth and they told us that she would come up. But I could see she was stressed....I told them that if they didn't get her up, I would. So I went to step in and they lifted her up.".

Rantzen then talks to Barbara Proctor, mother of Ean Proctor. Ean Proctor was also placed in a pool. Ean's mother starts to explain:

BP: "At first they said it was just a virus"
Rantzen: "Then they started to blame you"
BP: "The day they came to take him from us without any warning...they took him out to the ambulance, we didn't know when we'd see him...they told Ean...that they'd taken him from us because we were letting him die".

The programme then cuts to a recorded interview with Ean Proctor:

"One day the local GP turned up. He said he had two social workers with him. They said they had a court order to remove me to a place of safety and within about 10 minutes an ambulance arrived and I was then taken away from my parents and put into a place of safety at the hospital, where I stayed for six months."

Proctor says the doctors believed that his problems were psychological.

"So they tried different things like in the swimming pool, they turned me upside down to see if I'd turn myself round to breathe and they'd put me on a ghost train to see if any shocks would make me jump and they'd put me in a standing frame as I was paralysed in a wheelchair, they wanted to straighten my legs but they left me in there one time too long and I passed out and I basically used to, every so often, be taken into a room with a psychologist where he'd ask me if I was on his side yet and believed his story."

The filmed interview ends and the programme cuts back to Proctor's mother. She says they'll never forget what happened and that they were treated "worse than something that crawled out of the gutter".

It is noticeable that neither Stuttaford nor Fitzpatrick applauds Barbara Proctor despite the rest of the audience doing so.

Rantzen then turns to another couple talking about their son. He was referred to an immunologist by their GP but upon doing so, were told by the immunologist that their son had psychiatric problems and that the parents were causing him to be ill.

Rantzen: "Did he have a name for the psychiatric case?"
Parents: "Oh yes, Munchausen's syndrome by proxy".

The audience audibly reacts to this. Dr. Sarah Myhill raises her right hand to her face whilst shaking her head. The father says: "...his attitude was when I mentioned M.E. to him he said 'M.E.? M.E. is what few oddbods think they've got wrong with them and there's a few oddbods out there that want to treat them.'".

The programme enters its final phase and, frankly, I didn't find it interesting. It deals with the perennial problem of 'cures' for newly discovered/poorly researched illnesses. This is where the show turns into the serious part of Rantzen's former vehicle "That's Life!" and I don't think it merits many words apart from these: Dr. Peter Sandon, the 'Vega' machine and the future Mrs. Paul McCartney.

Before Rantzen ends the show she returns to Barbara Proctor. Proctor says:

"The only thing I want to see changed is doctors to accept M.E. as an illness and to help them.".

The audience claps - apart from two people...

So, one or two things perhaps worth mentioning. Golding is said to be 18 the time of the programme - 1996. She fell ill at the age of ten. That would mean she became ill in about 1988 - the same year that Proctor was also placed into a swimming pool. Did both swimming pool incidents happen in the same year? Did Proctor and Golding encounter the same doctors then?

Lastly, I cannot help but say that Dr. Stuttaford comes across as arrogant and condescending. I know the audience largely didn’t agree with him (and I’d say that his later accusation of bias has a certain merit) but he must surely have anticipated that (caveat emptor). I don’t think he did himself any favours and, if anything, played into the hands of patients.