Why Bri­tan­nia Hos­pi­tal remains a sav­age British satire

The final film in Lind­say Anderson’s Mick Travis ​‘every­man’ tril­o­gy – along with If… and Oh Lucky Man – Bri­tan­nia Hos­pi­tal is a sav­age com­e­dy that plays out like a lost Car­ry On script­ed by Bertolt Brecht with a size­able chip on both its body-hor­ror shoulders.

Released in 1982, just as the Falk­lands War was kick­ing off and Mar­garet Thatch­er was hit­ting her polar­is­ing stride, divid­ing the coun­try into the have’s (here’s your mon­ey-pit) and the have-nots (here’s your cess-pit) it is anti­re­al­ist, oper­at­ic, hor­rif­ic, over-the-top and it spares nobody.

With over 70 speak­ing parts and no dis­cernible lead, the plot is slight – chaos incar­nate. We are dropped into a hos­pi­tal on its last legs, await­ing the futile arrival of the Queen Moth­er. Behind cold closed doors, sin­is­ter med­ical exper­i­ments are not only prac­tised but also bizarrely rehearsed. Through open pub­lic doors, NHS staff mem­bers are strik­ing and quib­bling about every­thing and noth­ing, some­times even break­ing out into sen­ti­men­tal song.

Out­side, gath­ered at the Hospital’s goth­ic gates, it’s all burnt air and boil­ing anger – infan­tile law­less­ness – as crowds of demon­stra­tors bark at the quo­tid­i­an, grind­ing struc­tures that entrap them. This is the worka­day world with no heroes and many villains.

Where before, Mick Travis (Mal­colm McDow­ell) grabbed a Bren gun and start­ed his own lit­tle rooftop insur­rec­tion in If…, and then lat­er voy­aged through a Britain rav­aged by cap­i­tal­ism and post-colo­nial­ism in Oh, Lucky Man, here he is a rov­ing doc­u­men­tar­i­an, hell-bent on expos­ing the weird ways of the hospital.

As with all of Anderson’s films, he draws superb per­for­mances from his cast, an inspired mix of ​‘low­brow’ (a phrase Ander­son would have jus­ti­fi­ably deplored) screen-steal­ers like Ful­ton Mack­ay, Leonard Rossiter and Robyn Askwith along­side the likes of Joan Plowright and Mark Hamill.

Re-watch­ing it recent­ly, under our col­lec­tive COVID-cloud, I couldn’t help but think: maybe Boris John­son and Dominic Cum­mings where born in this hos­pi­tal – or, worse, run it. They would fit right (wing) in. The par­al­lels between then and now are striking.

At times it may seem like Ander­son is cam­paign­ing on behalf of the NLM (No Lives Mat­ter) cause, but that would be over­look­ing his human­i­tar­i­an con­cerns – a thread that runs, albeit aloofly, through­out all of his films; each is imbued with a queasy aware­ness that things are ter­ri­bly wrong.

An auteur in the man­ner of Luis Buñuel and his idol John Ford, he made vision­ary odyssey’s that dealt in both tran­scen­dence and grit. Bri­tan­nia Hos­pi­tal ends on a SCI-FI blast every bit as spir­i­tu­al as the star child in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ander­son had a heart. It just beat dif­fer­ent­ly than most others.

A slight aside, when I was work­ing with Mark E Smith, singer-song­writer of The Fall – and anoth­er divi­sive mav­er­ick – on his auto­bi­og­ra­phy ​‘Rene­gade’, he often spoke about Bri­tan­nia Hos­pi­tal. He loved it. You can tell. It ​‘feels’ like a Fall song, like argu­men­ta­tive dyna­mite – by turns, sarky, narky, mean, sham­bol­ic, futur­is­tic, caus­tic, very fun­ny and odd­ly moving.

Bri­tan­nia Hos­pi­tal is released on 29 June via Pow­er­house Films as part of their Indi­ca­tor series.