Public sector employees everywhere treat their clients as barely tolerated irritants

I watched Shadowlands again the other day, Richard Attenborough’s film about C.S. Lewis’s relationship with Joy Gresham, and was struck by one scene in particular. Anthony Hopkins is sitting beside the hospital bed of Debra Winger when suddenly she takes a turn for the worse. He leaps from his chair and runs out into the corridor. ‘Nurse, Nurse!’ he cries and almost instantly a nurse comes running and darts into his wife’s room. Shortly afterwards, a doctor appears and he updates Hopkins on Winger’s condition in a tactful, solicitous manner.

For any middle-class person who’s spent time in a hospital recently, this seems laughably out of date. Apparently, there really was a time, not so long ago, in which the social hierarchy of modern Britain was preserved in the NHS. If you were a professional person of some standing — an Oxford don, say — nurses would show you a good deal of respect.