Following the GMB presenter as she copes with husband Derek Draper’s time in intensive care, this one-off documentary shows a human side behind the statistics
A week after the UK first locked down in March 2020, Derek Draper was admitted to hospital with Covid-19. And it is there that the psychologist, former lobbyist and Labour campaign adviser remains. He has spent months in intensive care, including time in an induced coma, after his liver, kidneys and heart failed and were agonisingly restored to function by the tireless work of the ICU team.
Kate Garraway: Finding Derek (ITV) is a film fronted by his wife, the Good Morning Britain presenter, about a year of coping with this astonishing rupture to their lives, and to those of their two children Bill and Darcey. It is hard to capture how magnificent – wholly unshowily so – she is. Garraway is a strong communicator, which you might expect from someone in her line of work. But here she is stripped of studio artifice, as she chats to the director, to us, the viewers, to people online and outdoors. She gathers information about the impact of long Covid on sufferers and their families, and you are reminded that being able to hold and diffuse attention on camera, in the right proportions, is a gift. Honed by experience, for sure – but still something not everyone can do. (She even manages to survive a fantastically literal soundtrack that insists on making itself heard between her pieces to camera in case we can’t be trusted to maintain our emotional pitch. At one point, during a pocket of improvement for Draper, I would not have been surprised if D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better had suddenly been inflicted on us all.)
