When the prophet Isaiah forecast the time when “the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped”, it’s unlikely that he was far-sighted enough to be thinking of tonight’s Channel 4 schedule. But in Breaking the Silence Live, viewers will witness the moment when doctors at Manchester Royal Infirmary switch on for the first time cochlear implants that could restore hearing.
Although success would clearly be heartwarming (and audiological clinics can expect a deluge of requests from hearing-impaired people for the procedure) some of us planning to watch might also find the prospect slightly spine-chilling.
What is the benefit of asking a patient to undergo such an intensely private moment of discovery or disappointment on national TV? Has the NHS funding crisis reached the point that clinics are having to subsidise treatment through broadcast fees?
Nervousness increases because Channel 4 has form in this genre of surprising scenarios offered as live entertainment. In Russian Roulette (2003), the illusionist Derren Brown appeared to be gambling with his life by using logic and psychology to calculate which chamber of a gun contained a live bullet. He was followed in 2006 by Going Cold Turkey Live – in which heroin addicts were shown nightly as they underwent withdrawal – before an unofficial trilogy of medical-jeopardy TV was completed by Surgery Live (2011), where heart, brain, stomach and pituitary operations were transmitted as they were happening.
It is no coincidence that all these programmes were screened by Channel 4, which is also showing Breaking the Silence Live. Set up with a remit to be more daring than other terrestrial channels, the network has consistently been less hidebound by guidelines and regulators. And, if you want to take risks on TV, live shows are, in one way, the most sensible environment. The absence of material that can be previewed prevents the pressure for re-editing or removal from the schedules that can affect contentious pre-recorded shows.
The level of actual hazard in Brown’s Russian Roulette stunt was subsequently questioned by a statement from police in Jersey (where it was filmed) that the production company had given an undertaking to use blank ammunition. This suggests that Brown was either misleading the audience, or had misled the police. Even so, that broadcast – like Surgery Live and Going Cold Turkey Live – tantalised viewers with the oxymoronic possibility of a live death.
Breaking the Silence Live is clearly the most benign idea, as the biggest risk is that an implant may not work (and the percentage chance of that eventuality can presumably be predicted from off-screen clinical experience).
Even so, the transmission does raise some ethical dilemmas, and so I put them to the production team. They stressed that the clinical procedure would never be affected by the needs of TV. Whereas I had feared that patients might have been persuaded to wait until Channel 4 was ready to see if they could hear, the usual gap between surgery and switch-on (there is a standard delay to let the device embed) has been observed.
In choosing the patients to take part, consideration has also been given to the likelihood of success in their case and their mental robustness to deal with a setback being witnessed by millions. And, while many would sympathise if the NHS were using Channel 4 as emergency subsidy, only a small fee has been paid to the hospital to cover additional staffing and cleaning costs caused by the presence of the TV team.
On the question of why the stories could not have been filmed for transmission in the more normal way of factual TV, the producers accept that the buzz of live jeopardy makes the show more attractive, but also see it as an experiment in a new way of making docs about docs.
These answers satisfied my qualms about what might happen. I still can’t quite see what either the patient or a viewer would gain from witnessing a cochlear implant fail to deliver its promise, but – beside Russian Roulette, Going Cold Turkey Live and Surgery Live – Breaking the Silence Live sounds as if it has listened hard to the concerns raised by its predecessors.
• Breaking the Silence Live is on Channel 4 tonight at 8pm.
