Fleapit revisited:Help.

Care workers carry out some of the most important work in the whole of our country. Important, difficult, and unrewarding (the average hourly wage of a care home worker is £8.50 an hour*). Care workers wash people, change people, feed people, and wipe their bums. Most importantly of all, they give people reaching the end of their lives a dignity.

That's what raises us above the animals. Watching the TV movie Help (initially shown on Channel 4 in 2021, directed by Marc Munden, and written by Jack Thorne) I was reminded of visiting my Nan in the Oak Lodge Care Home near Basingstoke towards the end of her life. I was reminded of the way that care homes give elderly people a sense of community and even provide them with entertainment. In Help, that came in the form of ventriloquists, visits from sheep, and poetry recitals.

Or it did before the pandemic arrived. Sarah (an excellent Jodie Comer) starts work in a Liverpool care home (it's not just the accents that remind you it's in Liverpool but the references to Ian Rush, Kenny Dalglish, and lobscouse) at the end of 2019. Her boss, Steve (Ian Hart) seems blunt to the point of rudeness but it's soon revealed he's only 'baiting' her and that is, at heart, a good man who cares about the home's residents.

Who include Sue Johnston's Gloria, Cathy Tyson's Polly (seeing these actors who we remember in much younger roles reminds us that old age comes to all of us), and Steve Garti's Kenny. Most of all she bonds with Tony (Stephen Graham, as brilliant as ever), a 47 year old man with early onset Alzheimer's who keeps leaving the home to go and see his mum - having forgotten she has died.

Sarah and Tony bond over stories of youthful escapades and games of shithead and when we finally meet Sarah's father Bob (Andrew Schofield) he's revealed to be quite a piece of work. He's drunk, he's angry, and he's cruel. Maybe Sarah sees in Tony the type of man, kind and humorous, she would have liked her father to have been.

Played very straight with only diegetic. rather than background, music, Help takes us back to those early months of 2020 and takes us behind the door of one of the care homes that Matt Hancock lied he'd put a 'protective ring' around. We hear of the first Covid death in the UK (in the RBH, Reading - the hospital my brother died in) on the radio in Sarah's car and then we discover that people from hospitals are to be moved into care homes to clear beds for Covid victims.

One of the residents, soon enough, develops a cough and though it's as predictable as it is grim what happens next that does not make Help any less powerful. It soon becomes apparent that the government is making disastrous, and deadly, mistakes and mishandling the pandemic and those in care homes, both staff and residents, are being hung out to dry.

As befits a film that even had me welling up during an anecdote about Graeme Souness, Help is very moving from the off. The playing of Fields Of Athenry on a mobile phone, the tears streaming down care worker's cheeks as they realise they've been left to fend for themselves, the residents waving to their families through closed windows, and the vision of an empty lounge where once the residents would have gathered but now no longer can.

Many never again. During the last quarter of an hour there's a twist that doesn't quite fit in with the realistic feel of the rest of the film but it's a minor quibble in a film so important and so well delivered. A film that shows how an already impossible situation was made far worse by the incompetence, greed, and selfishness of Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock. The fact they have yet to face a reckoning for that, and have even profiteered handsomely from their failures, is as criminal as the actions they took, or failed to take, nearly three years ago. We all know that. Help showed it.

*Figures given from the time of the making of Help but, you may have noticed by the ongoing strikes, the government have hardly been generous towards the public sector since then.