It’s quite a good series and ran from 2010-2013. The premise:
When a sleepy 1960s Welsh mining town’s only doctor dies, the only replacement the union representative could find arrives, straight from India. To everyone’s surprise, he’s better educated and more cultured then anyone they know, yet friendly and eager to help.
Season 2 is hitting really close to home. A boy in the village has contracted smallpox. When this aired in 2012, little did we know that eight years later we’d be seeing everything that happens in this village play out all over the world.
- The doctor shuts the mine because the men are in such close quarters underground.
- “You can’t shut the mine-- we have to earn a living.”
- The doctor orders people to go home and stay there.
- If they’re out, they need to stay six feet apart.
- The doctor requests vaccine from the public health department in a big city, and they send SEVEN doses for the whole village.
- He has to decide who gets those doses.
- The local preacher declines the vaccine because “prayer works and God will save me.”
- The local policeman plays down the epidemic in a radio interview, and it’s broadcast as “everything is fine-- it’s all over.”
- Public health staff arrive with enough doses for the whole village, but now no one wants to take the vaccine because “they said on the radio it was all over,” and “I’m not sick, why should I take it.”
- On and on…
I watched the series when it first came out and remember nothing of the smallpox story line. I wonder if I thought, “That is not the least bit believable. People can’t be that stupid.”
