Greg Dyke on Nye Bevan

This isn’t actually the show I planned to put up. I wanted to link to a really marvelous feature called The NHS: a Difficult Beginning, which originally went out around the Sixtieth Anniversary earlier this year and was repeated on Wednesday. That programme, though, is unaccountably not available on iPlayer. Probably some kind of rights issue. A real pity: it was a fascinating mostly first-person account of the moral courage, brinkmanship and political contingency that brought the NHS into being in six months flat. But you’ll have to take my word for it because it’s gone. So, right after the NHS documentary was this very personal programme about Nye Bevan—NHS founder, socialist firebrand and the greatest 20th Century political figure never to have been Prime Minister—by Greg Dyke. And it’s almost as good as the NHS doc.