Hello, and welcome to your weekly pulse of public policy. Following on from last week’s article about how a television broadcast came to play a part in a set of real-world policy challenges, I want to stick with TV but take a different tack. Sometimes a work of fiction can provide insightful commentary on policy: usually on TV this will be in drama (though it could be scripted comedy), and it might look at a particular incident or real-life episode. I’ve sometimes thought there might be mileage in following a policy measure through its life cycle, from some people campaigning for it, to a government enacting it, to another group finding it causes unintended problems for them and campaigning for change… but I suspect it might be overly high concept (pr. “boring”). But this week I want to look at the policy insights on offer from zombies.
A virtue of fantasy or science fiction programmes can be that they engage with difficult contemporary (or historical) issues thematically, looking at human motivations and emotional impact without getting bogged down in the specifics of a given situation. So for example, the modern Battlestar Galactica, produced contemporaneously with the occupation of Iraq, featured a pointed suicide bomber storyline. In Doctor Who, the Daleks were initially created as part of a story that was very clearly a parable for the then-ongoing Cold War, and were later transformed into a direct analogy for the Nazis. Much more recently, BBC Three’s zombie drama In The Flesh (2013-14) proved highly acute in riffing off many aspects of contemporary British society, and policy responses. I remember thinking at the time it was the Boys from the Blackstuff for the Coalition era. Viewed now, it seems even more acute, and almost uncannily prescient.
(Note: this article contains mild spoilers for In The Flesh, though it won’t give away any major plot points. It also contains brief reference to suicide, as well as one or two slightly grisly things of the sort one might expect from discussion of a zombie drama.)
I recently re-watched In The Flesh, and part-way through was astonished to remember that it was made before both Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. The series opens as the world is recovering from your traditional zombie apocalypse: the recently deceased rose from their graves and lurched around eating people’s innards unless shot in the head. But beyond this initial premise, In The Flesh sets things up in a distinctive and interesting way: the Rising has been understood as a medical phenomenon, dubbed ‘partially deceased syndrome’, and it has become possible to medicate the undead. They don’t come back to life as such, but they are returned to their old characters and lose their flesh-eating impulses.
The series therefore opens in a large prison-like facility full of ex-zombies, now medicated and ready to be released back to their families and former lives. The creation of large facilities to cope with a medical emergency now has an obvious resonance with the “Nightingale” hospitals, in the sense that the state can whip up things like this if it really needs to. Likewise, the rapid development of medication to restore the risen to their old selves foreshadowed the remarkably swift creation of Covid vaccines. If any viewer in 2013 was sceptical that a medical emergency could be dealt with so quickly and at such scale, a few years later they were proved wrong (leaving aside debates about whether the response could have been better). Later in the series, when most of the people who need treatment have had it, the initial large scale provision is wound down and the task of treating the remaining small numbers is outsourced to a private contractor, whereupon the performance of the service collapses.
Interestingly, there are a few instances where the acuity shown by the programme in dealing with themes and issues isn’t matched by how it deals with specifics. One such is that the formal term for the people who have risen is “partially deceased syndrome sufferer”: in reality the term “sufferer” is one that all actors in the health and care sector take pains to avoid. One might expect people to talk much more in terms of “people with PDS” or similar. Then again, during the pandemic the Government and NHS quickly took to using the condescending, aggravating description “clinically extremely vulnerable”, which was widely resented by many of the people it was applied to. It’s nothing like as awful as ‘sufferer’, but maybe In The Flesh wasn’t so far out in terms of how officialdom develops and applies language.
In other respects, the show captures some aspects of the good and bad patient experience quite well, however. The show’s protagonist, Kieren, is discharged from the facility and sent home by a convincingly paternalistic doctor, who makes no attempt to listen to his patient (the exception rather than the rule in reality, but well depicted). NHS facilities have posters on the wall depicting a smiling ex-zombie in the wall, and captioned “We understand Partially Deceased Syndrome.” But there’s an overtone of coercion as well, perhaps recalling the more difficult side of mental health treatment, with a clear compulsion placed on ‘assimilated PDS sufferers’ to take their medicine.
Where the series is especially acute, rather than surprisingly prescient, is in its depiction of how “PDS sufferers” are treated by society generally and the Government in particular. It draws on the experiences of, and policies for, various groups who have a minority status because of a health condition or some sort of public policy categorisation. So, attitudes towards “sufferers” often recalls attitudes to drug addicts: while there may be an acknowledgement that it is in some way a medical issue, many people can’t help but feel that it reflects a personal failing for which the individual is culpable. This extends to the PDS “sufferers” themselves: they are seen attending AA-style support groups, and made to repeat the mantra, “what I did in my untreated state was not my fault.”
Over the course of the series, the rules get increasingly harsh, and clearly echo the “hostile environment” policies that would later lead to the Windrush scandal, and the treatment of benefits claimants. People with PDS are forced to “give something back” in obligatory community work schemes, wearing red tabards; Kieren’s passport is confiscated until he has completed the scheme, with the threshold for completion never stated. This becomes a condition for regaining citizenship. A particularly well observed aspect of this is that his family members are willing to take the scheme in good faith: their attitudes vary between sympathy for Kieren and credulity towards the official line, with harder attitudes sometimes sneaking into the house, either as a hangover from the turbulence of the Rising itself, or as a result of misleading media reports that present the Government’s divisive policies without challenge. Later still, people with PDS are forced to apologise to anyone who claims to have been made uncomfortable simply by their presence.
It’s this sharp depiction of social attitudes that can make it easy to forget that the series pre-dates the Brexit referendum: the social divisions exposed by the rising are not a million miles from the liberal-authoritarian divide later exposed by Brexit. The programme is set in the small Lancashire town of Roarton, largely made up of grey post-war houses nestled among imposing, rain-soaked hills. The town is known for being hardline and intolerant towards people with PDS, or “rotters” as the slang has it. The Human Volunteer Force, a militia that sprang up to help contain the Rising, was founded in Roarton, and the town’s population continues to be stirred up by the local preacher, who uses the term “beasts” to describe people with PDS, whether they had had treatment or not (indeed, the HVF’s name crucially carries the implicit message that “rotters” are not human). The townsfolk grumble about being neglected in favour of the big cities, where there are still protective troop deployments, and warn grimly against travelling into them as attacks by militant groups grow – even going to the city comes to be seen as taking your life in your hands. Graffiti (“beware rotters”) remains visible across the town, and many people make no effort to understand people with PDS, assuming they are a threat and hostile, even when treated. It’s impossible not to conclude that Roarton would be a strongly Brexit-voting town in real life. And in a drama made today, any character objecting to the term “rotter” would be howled down as “woke”.
The programme also draws heavily on the recent history of armed conflict, particularly within the UK, and to an extent elsewhere. The Human Volunteer Force is clearly recognisable as a Northern Ireland-style paramilitary outfit, right down to “god bless the HVF” slogans on walls and the ends of houses. They have officially been disbanded at the start of the series, but veterans still walk around the town in berets, armbands and camouflage gear (in a way one suspects they would not in bigger cities). They demand “respect”, can quickly become local rabble-rousers, and are keen to resume patrols looking for remaining untreated rotters… or even treated ones. They are a presence at the local British Legion, which causes a flashpoint by withdrawing its offer of free drinks for veterans (and later is the scene for another when it establishes a segregated area for people with PDS, in the corridor to the toilets, and later still employs Kieren behind the bar). By the end of the second series the HVF has assumed a more prominent role again as tensions rise, culminating in a contentious parade through the town.
Those rising tensions are also well observed. The programme does a good job of depicting tensions within campaigning groups, and also the weaknesses often seen in extremist movements, as well as how both can polarise wider opinion. Faced with steadily mounting hostility, people with PDS have differing views over to what extent they should comply with the rules, particularly the forced labour scheme, but also the expectation that they should wear make-up to restore a more natural skin-tone and conceal their zombie-like features. At times their arguments echo those of disabled people’s organisations explored in last week’s Policy Pulse. Some take things further. arguing it would be better to ditch their medication and revert to being “rabid”, or even taking drugs in order to revert temporarily and mount terror attacks. At the extreme, an Undead Liberation Army emerges.
On the other side, mainstream politics becomes polarised, and a hardline political party emerges called Victus (it’s nice to have a fictional political party with a convincing name for once), opposing “PDS integration”. It’s a clear riff on UKIP, with messaging criticising a “corrupt elite” whose resonance I missed on first broadcast. The programme’s depiction of extremism on both sides is chillingly incisive. The cultish “Undead Prophet” who emerges online spreading inflammatory messages is now immediately reminiscent of QAnon, and HVF volunteers are shown to be inclined to conspiracy theories to justify their ongoing attacks on rotters. But again, the show in fact pre-dates Trump’s serious entry into American politics. It also convincingly shows splits emerging among hardliners, and the hypocrisy sometimes at work among those expressing hardline views: one of the most vociferous anti-PDS locals is later found to be harbouring his now-treated wife, while an over-zealous local official is caught visiting a brothel of PDS sex workers.
Curiously, formal politics is another area where the programme is less sure-footed. In the second series, the town’s newly elected Victus MP turns up – having seemingly not been a presence around town before her election, which makes little sense – and starts taking on a local organising role more like some kind of sheriff. It serves the story well, but is a rare example of an element of the series just not ringing true. There is also a Department of Partially Deceased Affairs, whose name seems a slightly lazy riff on Yes, Minister type satire – departmental names containing the word “affairs” are pretty old-fashioned (Defra was established over 20 years ago, and it’s hard to imagine a new department using that formulation; quite possibly its name is an indicator of the fundamental weaknesses that Johnny Mercer criticised in the more recent set-up of the Office for Veterans’ Affairs…). Then again, its helpline is very convincingly shown as under-resourced and always busy. Also more plausibly, the anti-discrimination PDS Protection Act is shown as fairly toothless, and offers no real-world protection to Kieren, who is to a large extent housebound for his own safety when he returns home.
Overall, there’s a tremendous richness to the programme’s deft use of parallels with real life situations, which ensure the experiences of the risen are convincingly rooted in a plausible reality. It can’t all be covered here, but also worthy of note are the religious overtones (militant people with PDS calling themselves “the redeemed”), the military style cemetery for victims of the Rising (complete with white cross gravestones), and the detail that killed rotters were burnt during the Rising on foot-and-mouth style pyres.
One omission is that there’s no exploration of what it has all meant for the economy, in terms of either the disruption that must have been caused by the Rising, or the impact of lots of people suddenly being returned to society who had left it. Contrast this with, say, Torchwood Miracle Day (2011), where the cessation of death rapidly causes huge resource and supply chain problems, as every day tens of thousands more people are alive worldwide than should be.
A further interesting omission, though I suspect more deliberate, is sexuality as an issue in the story. Kieren’s death, before his resurrection, was by suicide, apparently as a result of struggling with his sexuality, and the departure of his best friend Rick for the army. He does strike up a relationship in the second series, though his PDS status is the big story point, rather than his sexuality. The exact nature of his earlier relationship with Rick is left ambiguous, although Rick is shown in passing to have a bedroom plastered with lads mag-style posters of women, and all-round to be putting on a show of living up to the expectations of his toxic-masculinity-writ-large father – not coincidentally, a leading figure in the HVF. Rick perhaps managed to convince his father about his sexuality and character, but when he returns from Afghanistan in a partially deceased state he can’t make it work any more. And that may be the point: is Roarton’s attitude towards people with PDS intended as a metaphor for wider social attitudes, including on sexuality? Is it the entire point of the show that Kieren and Rick were about as welcome in Roarton as zombies as they would have been as out gay men? Well, you’ll need to read a blog by someone with an English literature degree for that sort of analysis…
As I hope this has made clear, I can’t recommend In The Flesh highly enough. It has a richness, and pointedness, to its writing that seem all the more acute in light of events that took place after it was made, as well as remaining hugely powerful in terms of the stories it tells about its characters. It is apparently only available on iPlayer for another couple of months, so if you want to watch it (or re-watch it), you probably need to get a move on. But be warned: it’s bleak. It turns out even Brexit and Covid-19 in quick succession aren’t quite as grim as a zombie apocalypse.