CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Memo to revellers – it’s not just Covid that’s a threat to the NHS

Ambulance

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Secrets of Pompeii: Greatest Treasures 

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Protect the NHS. That’s the slogan of 2020, the three words that sum up all Britain’s determination to keep our hospitals functioning throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

So the spectacle of thousands selfishly abusing the health service in a spirit of celebration is shocking. I would say ‘sobering’ but that’s the wrong word.

On the night of St Patrick’s Day in Liverpool last year, so many drunken revellers were stumbling around, brawling and collapsing, that the emergency services were overwhelmed. By midnight, a new 999 call came in every 15 seconds, with more than 5,000 logged during that 24 hours.

The observational documentary Ambulance (BBC1) witnessed the mounting anxiety in the control room as call handlers were unable to keep pace with the avalanche. Many of the callers were drunk, some incoherent, a few foul-mouthed and abusive.

To make the situation worse than in previous years, it now seems commonplace for young people heading out to the pub to take a knife — ‘just in case of trouble’, as one exasperated medic put it.

Inevitably, this tipped scuffles into serious violence, with knives pulled out and used in disputes that might otherwise have blown over harmlessly.

Amid this chaos, emergency calls were backing up unanswered in a queue. Staff at BT tried to help, phoning the incident room’s hotline to alert them to one high priority case. A distraught father had found his baby was not breathing.

Calmly and professionally, a call handler talked him through chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth for the child. Paramedics were on the scene within minutes. But as the call ended, it appeared their help had come too late.

Might that baby be alive today if the crew had been able to respond sooner? We will never know, but there is no doubt that help would have been available earlier, and the father would not have endured an agonising wait in 999 limbo, if drunken violence had not flooded the streets of the city that night.

The producers of Ambulance do not pass judgment on such things. There is no attempt to follow up their nightly stories: the drama stops when a patient is delivered to the hospital entrance.

Instead, the emphasis is on showing the human side of the crews, sharing a joke and words of mutual encouragement.

But viewers are free to reach our own conclusions. When heavy drinking turns riotous and out of control, it prevents the health service from doing its job. That affects all of us — including the most innocent.

And it’s no defence to plead that humans have always been prone to overdosing on alcohol because, as historian Bettany Hughes discovered in Secrets Of Pompeii: Greatest Treasures (C5), boozy excess didn’t have to end in violence during ancient times.

In a lurid party room at a mansion in the shadow of Vesuvius, known as the House of Mysteries, she showed us murals depicting an orgy dedicated to Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. There was more flagrant debauchery than you’ll see on any British street at chucking-out time. Some of it was so raunchy that the murals had to be blurred and pixelated.

Come to think of it, ‘blurred and pixelated’ is a fair description of the revellers themselves.

But no one got stabbed, and nowhere in the paintings was the city guard being called in.

This two-hour tour of Pompeii’s ruins presented little new information but painted a picture of a town where pleasure was paramount — exotic food, lavish spectacle and hard drinking. It appears the Romans handled it rather better than we do.