A Little Bit More Serious Than A Normal Flu:Pandemic 2020.

Another television programme about the pandemic? Really? Haven't we all had enough of it now? Can't we just move on and talk about something else? It's what the government, understandably bearing in mind their atrocious handling of events, would like and, for more honest reasons, it's what a lot of us would like. 

But we can't do that just yet. Despite, in the UK, the success of the vaccination roll-out we'll be living with Covid, and the after effects of it, for a very long time so if there is to be one more programme about it, and I suspect there will be many, it may as well be one made by James Bluemel and his team whose documentary, Once Upon A Time In Iraq, proved to be, for me, the most powerful piece of television made about that conflict and, quite correctly, won several awards.

But a pandemic, despite the bellicose language employed by many, is quite different to a war and an ongoing pandemic presents difficulties with film makers looking to tie up ends that remain, by their very nature, loose. Perhaps, because of this Pandemic 2020 (BBC2/iPlayer) lost a little impetus as its three hour long episodes drew to a close.

It remained, however, something of an essential watch. With testimonies provided from around the globe (UK, USA, China, Russia, Belarus, Lebanon (who had water shortages, electricity shortages, and that massive explosion to deal with last year as wel), Kenya, Colombia, and Iceland), Pandemic 2020 trod a fine line between the artier Adam Curtis style of documentary film making and the more traditional approach. Interviewees like Bronx activist Tanya Denise Fields, Bolshoi dancer and choreographer Ivan Vasiliev, Carlos Vladimir - a Colombian hero from Bogota who is named after both Marx and Lenin, and Arny (whose surname is not given) - an Icelandic daughter who thought, initially, Covid was a lot of fuss about nothing but went on to realise that it was, in fact, "a little bit more serious than a normal flu".

She wasn't the only one to downplay Covid. The story starts on New Year's Eve 2019 with large crowds around the world gathering to celebrate together. Before cutting to individual interviewees sat on chairs in dark studio rooms telling their version of the events that unfolded in a crisis what would make abundantly stark just how much unites people around the world, and just how much divides them.

First up, appropriately enough, is Qiangyao Jie, a food blogger from Wuhan, and her husband Jie Yang. She talks briefly about her wedding day at the start of 2020 but soon moves on to tell of how her cousin, who'd been fine at the wedding, fainted a day later and was taken to hospital. In the hospital in Wuhan, there was agitated talk about some new strain of pneumonia and, three days later, many in Wuhan woke up to find their city in lockdown.

Three people had already died of this new pneumonia. Which wasn't pneumonia at all but coronavirus. A city of over eleven million people had been, effectively, quarantined but it was still not enough, as we all now know, to stop coronavirus spreading across China and, soon enough, the entire planet.

All too familiar scenes played out in Wuhan. Hospital beds, masked medics, ambulances, empty streets, and bodies in bodybags being stretchered out on their way to the grave. New hospitals were built, shops sold out of essentials, people did 'keep fit' in front of their televisions, pyjamas became day-wear, and people suggested those that refused to wear masks should be imprisoned. 

But, to begin with, only in China. In Leamington Spa, Dr Amie Burbridge was celebrating her 40th birthday with a karaoke session. It would be the last celebration she'd enjoy for some time. People from all over the world talk about how Covid, initially, was viewed as a Chinese thing. Nothing for them to worry about. That changed when the disease reached Italy.

Dr Burbridge talks, sadly, of how she felt like a "bystander" as she watched people enter hospital, go into ICU, get intubated, and, eventually, die. It all happened so quickly and it was happening eveywhere. Spain declared a state of emergency, France went into a lockdown, and, eventually, after a shameful and lethal period of vacillating, the UK did too.

World leaders and other observers commented on how everyone was in the same boat but some, like Newsnight's Emily Maitlis, made a much more profound observation. We were all in the same sea but we were in very different boats. Some signed up to Netflix and did yoga and Joe Wicks workouts. Others wondered how they'd be able to afford food and if they'd even survive. For some it was an extended holiday (if a somewhat worrying one) and for others, like the eleven people who shared one flat on the suburbs of Paris, it was more like prison.

Most were somewhere in the middle. In Bogota, Colombia it was suggested that if your home, your family, needed help surviving the lockdown you should hang a red rag out of a window. The sheer number that appeared revealed a society of deep inequality and Colombia was not unique in that.

By spring, when most of Europe was entering its first lockdown, Wuhan was beginning to, ever so slightly, relax its initially very strict lockdown rules. The measures taken had proved to work and Qiangyao Xie, even now, seems perplexed as to why other countries didn't follow their lead. Puzzled by how slow other nations reacted.

"The textbook is right here and you don't even want to take it"! Some world leaders were worse than others and you won't be surprised to discover who they were. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko resisted lockdown entirely and joked that vodka could help prevent Covid, musicians even wrote songs denying the disease. It was, said Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, just "a little flu". A sentiment echoed by Donald Trump.

A message Trump stuck to even as mass graves were built in New York, a city that was fast becoming the epicentre of the pandemic. Mostly, the people were ahead of their leaders. Around the world (footage is shown from Argentina, Cuba, Greece, India, Spain, and the UK) we clapped our carers and key workers and we checked in on our family and friends. But clapping doctors and nurses didn't put food on their tables and it didn't stop them catching Covid.

With a hugely increased threat to their own lives, working horrendous shifts in unimaginably terrifying conditions, doctors and nurses couldn't even hug their own children when they returned home for fear of passing on the virus. It's telling that one of the most moving scenes in Pandemic 2020 is a group of medics, after their shift, lifting spirits by singing Proud Mary. The sense of joy and relief so pronounced against such a stark backdrop.

In the UK, daily deaths went from tens to hundreds to thousands pretty quickly. On the 8th April, the day the lockdown in Wuhan ended, the UK declared 1,030 Covid deaths. The USA and Brazil, too, were having particularly bad outcomes and yet some still denied this was related to the exceptionalist, divisive, and untruthful leaders in those countries.

Trump lied that the US, Americans, had more resilience than other nations but, in truth, no nation had more resilience. Even in the remote Westfjords region of Iceland, a place that could hardly be geographically or politically further from Wuhan, Covid arrived and found its way into the nursing homes. Arny, the lady who had been in denial about the seriousness of the disease, lost her mother.

We hear news reports from Kenya of a curfew being imposed. Authorities there made it clear that if Covid took hold in Kenya it would be the fault not of the government, but of the Kenyan people. It was a message that was echoed elsewhere including here in the UK. In some parts of Kenya, it is said that police enforcing curfew were responsible for more deaths than Covid itself.

The world leaders who had been caught off guard by the arrival of the pandemic were, now, learning how to use it to their advantage and those who supported those administrations were right behind them. While school children in Paris reported having nightmares about Donald Trump, Trump himself equivocated when asked about the death, on 25th May, of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

A "disgrace" said Trump but also a "good thing" for Floyd and, anyway, worse things happen to white people. When Black Lives Matter protests erupted into arson and vandalism Trump tweeted (when he was still able to) "when the looting starts, the shooting starts". It was quite different to the message, "we love you, you're very special", he gave when his own supporters stormed the Capitol Building in Washington DC this January.

These were protests carried about by those least affected either by the murder of an unarmed black man or by lockdown restrictions. These were the people, often company bosses and millionaires, who insisted the rest of us "get back to normal". The "normal" that worked so well for them and so badly for most of the rest of us.

To justify these dangerous beliefs, they had to believe that Covid was some kind of conspiracy. In Louisiana, we see Covid deniers and anti-maskers claim they're against social distancing and they believe the whole thing is a confection of the mainstream media before throwing in a needless aside about abortion clinics just because they can't resist doing so.

You're left with a deep sense that deadly though Covid was, and still is, it may be the least of our problems if the people that refused to take quick and decisive action, that denied, that blamed, and then took no responsibility for their role in the tragedy are left in power. Be sure that if these people remain in charge (and, so far, only Trump has gone and even he may come back) we will soon enough be facing an even larger problem. The one big lesson we should all learn from this pandemic is that there are people in positions of power who are, clearly, unfit to be there.