Saving Lives in Cardiff, review: however familiar the format, it's impossible not to be moved

Telegraph

09-04-2025

It seems we're suckers for Saving Lives. We've been at Sea, we've stalked hospital corridors in Leeds, and now it's back to Saving Lives in Cardiff (BBC Two) for a second look at surgeons doing seemingly impossible things. Impossible things that make writing reviews about their jaw-dropping efforts question my life choices.
Then again, the chances of me being able to sit for eight hours manoeuvring a delicate joystick in order to robotically remove a life-threatening tumour from behind the nose of a jolly ex-copper called Terry are next to zero. Thankfully for us, the likes of Prof Stuart Quine, the man in charge of said joystick, are wired differently.
We know the score with the Saving Lives strand by now. Filmed at Cardiff and Vale University hospital, patients with tricky (that's putting it mildly) conditions check in, a mixture of hope and fear in their eyes, to put their lives in the hands of the surgeons they trust to put their lives back on track. Yet, however familiar the format, it's impossible not to be moved by the stories which unfold before our eyes.
Aside from the almost impossibly chipper Terry, we also met Courtney, who, at 27 and hoping to start a family, had been diagnosed with Chiari malformation, a condition where the brain is too big for the skull. You're right, this is where things turned squeamish.
Though the sequences aren't overdone, Saving Lives does feature up-close and bloody operation shots that are not for the faint-hearted. Watching a surgeon painstakingly pick their way through the pulsing scarlet inner workings of a brain is a stiff test of anyone's queasometer.
Of course, no show set in a UK hospital in 2025 can sidestep the issues facing the NHS. And while the problem of ever-growing waiting lists is not front and centre, it's there all the same, with captions of escalating numbers, the implication that surgeons are having to choose which lives to save lurks like a spectre at the feast.
Still, rather like Noel Fitzpatrick's Supervet series, you can tell that the producers strive to steer towards the stories that have upbeat outcomes, however much jeopardy is injected into the story arcs of the cases we follow. But gird those loins because my guess is that future episodes may feature tears for sorrow as well as joy. Because, well, life is like that.