An emotionally shattering re-examination of Covid-19

For those of us lucky enough not to have lost anyone dear, the 12 months between March 2020 and March 2021 now have the quality of a peculiar dream. If we think of the period at all, it’s often in the context of alternating boredom and strangeness; breadmaking and homeschooling; bingeing Tiger King and wondering if 4pm is too early for having something. Can it possibly have been five years already since Boris Johnson stood at his podium, told us he’d been shaking hands with Covid patients, and, shortly afterwards, announced the first lockdown? Catey Sexton, the director of BBC One’s affecting — and at times shattering — documentary Love and Loss: The Pandemic 5 Years On, is very aware of this. “It feels like we’re in a rush to forget and move on,” she says. But for Sexton and tens of thousands of others, it’s not so easy. She lost her mother during the first Covid wave. Her mother was one of the thousands of people marooned in care homes, behind Matt Hancock’s famed “protective ring”. “All I could do was wave through the window,” Sexton recalls. “Mum couldn’t understand why I was outside”. Later in the film, she expands on her grief. “Mum spent her whole life looking after everyone else”, she says. “So my greatest sadness is that I couldn’t do that for her at the end”.

To her credit, and to the film’s benefit, Sexton largely either keeps her own experience out of the story she’s telling or intertwines it with the grief of the other bereaved people she interviews. Her subjects know she understands and the result is an essential act of communal witness and remembrance. The film’s narrative is essentially linear, a simple decision that gives the film a gently simmering polemical power. This is, rightly, never allowed to overwhelm the personal stories of loss - but equally correctly, never quite dissipates either. The British government got the pandemic wrong in instalments and they are subtly but persuasively laid out here. “I don’t want heads on spikes,” says one woman, acknowledging the extreme difficulty of the task that faced the government. All the same, to watch this film is to be reminded of how badly we were failed by our leaders during that time. And, for so many of us, how much that failure cost.

At around the same time Boris Johnson was addressing the nation, NHS workers were bracing themselves. They were preparing to make sacrifices — and over 2,000 of them would make the greatest sacrifice of all. We hear from the family of Areema Nasreen, who caught Covid in the hospital in which she worked — which was also the hospital in which she’d given birth to her children. And the family of Rebecca Regan, who slept in a caravan so she didn’t bring the virus into her family’s home, and who wasn’t able to be vaccinated because she was pregnant. After a while, Clap for Carers started to feel stagey and co-opted, but it began, we’re reminded here, as something both spontaneous and almost painfully sincere.

The weekly applause is one of the many moments in the film that catches you off guard; it reminds us of the many surreal moments that came to seem normal during the pandemic. But always, the memories are filtered through loss and grief. Rishi Sunak’s absurd Eat Out to Help Out initiative is treated with the scorn it deserves. But in truth, as the year went on, no one was handling themselves well. Inexorably, the nation’s physical health crisis became a mental health crisis too.

Jenny McCann recalls her brother John as a man who loved life. He was obsessively healthy, enjoyed bodybuilding and was careful what he ate. As 2020 went on, he became increasingly susceptible to conspiracy theories. Isolation fed his suspicions and he refused the vaccine. In 2021, the virus killed him. “I’m no longer cross with my brother for believing the conspiracy theories”, McCann says. “I’m cross with the peddlers of the disinformation.”