Program Title
Bramwell, Series 3

Episode number:
1 2 3 4

Description
Eleanors private practice is failing and encouraged by Robert, she applies for a part time job as a dresser at the St. Judes hospital. She is not surprised when the senior physician, Finn ONeill-a charismatic young Irishman and epidemiology specialist-rebuffs her. Robert however is indignant and pulls strings to get Eleanor the job despite ONeills objections to a woman. Outmanoevred by the appointments committee, he is forced to give Eleanor a trial. Eleanor is inspired by ONeills cutting edge medicine and works hard to impress him. At the same time, she takes a protective interest in one of the Thrifts hopeless cases, a child prostiture, Lucy. In her enthusiasm to prove herself to ONeill, Eleanor exploits Lucys trust and uses her, to Roberts disgust, as the subject of a public lecture. In the end, ONeill is so taken with Eleanor both professionally and personally that he offers her a full time post as his registrar-an unprecedented opportunity for a woman

Original broadcast date
1997-11-09

Cast	Characters
Jemma Redgrave	Dr. Eleanor Bramwell
David Calder	Dr. Robert Bramwell
Andrew Connolly	Dr. Finn O'Neill
Kevin McGonagle	Dr. Joe Marsham
Ruth Sheen	Nurse Carr
Cliff Parisi	Daniel Bentley
Keeley Gainey	Kate
Matilda Brooke
Peter Jonfield
Sarah Whitlock
Richard Kane
Dan Stauss
Richard Pasco
Andrew Lincoln
Cheryl Campbell
Charles Simon
Zizi Vaigncourt-Strallen
Kate Morgan
Vincent Wong
Lee Nichols
Robert Lang
Brenda Dowsett
Geoffrey Beevers
Peter Theedom
Kelly Reilly
John Castle
Ben Brazier

Credits
Executive Producer: Jonathan Powell
Producer: Harriet Davison, Tim Whitby
Director: David Tucker, Paul Unwin

Intro
BRAMWELL/Episode 1/Intro by Russell Baker

The men in Eleanor Bramwell's life have so far been a pretty grim bunch. There was a woman-hating doctor who tried to drive her out of medicine. There was a retired army man who wanted to marry her if she'd give up medicine…

There was another potential husband, a neurologist. He turned out to be secretly married. What's more, he was busy murdering his wife at the same time he was courting Eleanor.

At last, another kind of man enters her life tonight. He's Dr. Finn O'Neill and Dr. O'Neill is something new. Something very modern. He has the scientific mind.

He's willing to judge her by testing what she knows and what she can do.

Our Bramwell stories you remember began with Eleanor being fired from a teaching hospital. The surgeon who ran it didn't like women doctors -- especially if they knew more than he did.

The year is 1896. Eleanor has opened a charity clinic in the London slums and is about to experience the idealism of the new scientific world -- as well as its cruelty.

Bramwell, First episode.

Extro
BRAMWELL/Episode 1/Extro by Russell Baker

Our Bramwell stories take place in the late 1890s. England, to coin a phrase, was crossing the bridge to the twentieth century.

Now here we are crossing the bridge to the twenty-first and it's interesting to note in the Bramwell stories how many things have not changed in the past hundred years.

To be sure, medicine was primitive then, and dress was elegant. Now dress is primitive and medicine is elegant.

In those days, father and daughter played croquet on the lawn and cooled off with a glass of champagne. Nowadays father is working overtime at the office and daughter is sitting in a traffic jam listening to talk radio.

And yet the poverty that blighted Victorian slums is still with us, though we don't call them slums anymore. We call them inner cities.

Lucy, the alcoholic twelve-year-old girl who's pregnant and wants an abortion, seems an all too familiar figure in the America of the 1990s.

The difference is that a hundred years ago, Victorians -- like Eleanor's lecture audience -- could be shocked to hear her talked about in company.

As recently as forty years ago, television and movies would have banned a film about Lucy's predicament.

Now Lucy is such a familiar American figure that her story seems not so much shocking, as a little trite.

We are hardened to dreadful stories nowadays. Not like the easily shocked Victorians. We are tough here on the bridge to the twenty-first century.

For Masterpiece Theatre, I'm Russell Baker. Goodnight.



Episode number: 1 2 3 4




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