Spending lockdown in a small flat with his elderly mum has pushed comedian Mark Thomas to reflect on their sometimes stormy relationship. It’s also made him want to find out more about COVID-19. In the first of six podcasts, Mark calls frontline health workers to chat about coronavirus, end-of-life care and the importance of touch.

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‘Mark Thomas’s lockdown check-up’ is a six-part podcast commissioned by Wellcome Collection. The podcast is written and presented by Mark Thomas, the sound editor is Helen Atkinson, and the producers are Nicolas Kent and Susan McNicholas. Photography by Franklyn Rodgers. New episodes are published every Thursday.

Hello. Welcome to ‘Mark Thomas’s lockdown check-up’. I’m Mark Thomas, and this is the first of six podcasts that talks to health and care workers about their lives, work and changes through this first phase of COVID-19. But let me begin by explaining a little bit about my own situation first.

I’m talking to you from a small bedroom; it is about three metres wide by about five metres long. There is room for a bed; there is a brown table with a computer on it. The walls are completely white. It is slightly monastic. This is one of two small bedrooms in a flat in south London, where I am in lockdown with my 85-year-old mother.

For older listeners, I’ve described this situation as like being in an episode of ‘Mrs Steptoe and Son’. For younger listeners, I’m 57 and living with my mum. We have not spent this much concentrated time together since I was six, and unaware of the concept of familial divorce. My mum is fiercely independent, curmudgeonly and contrarian.

I’m awkward, yeah, I know that. And Ruth says to me, “Play nice, Mum.” And I go, “Okay darling. I’ll try to be good,” because I know that I should.

Ruth is my sister, who lives around the corner and is a vicar. And so can testify that my mum has a working vocabulary of profanity that would give the Duke of Edinburgh a run for his money.

She has a glower that could stop a charging hippo at 50 paces. And a temperament that supports its own microclimate.

Mark, you are the most aggravating person that is on the planet.

That was my mum, and I’m think of putting her quote on a tour poster. My mum’s age puts her in the high risk category. She’s got various conditions, and a prescription list that is handled by Eddie Stobart. So when lockdown began I was scared for what might happen to her. I had a responsibility to her to stop the virus getting into this flat and I was frightened I would fail her. I was frightened of the suffering and pain that that might cause and there was more than a dash of guilt involved. So I wanted to find out as much as I could about COVID-19. How it was spreading, what was happening with it, what was happening to the sufferers, what was going to stop it.

I read research papers, followed the news and watched every daily government briefing. My mum, on the other hand, she wanted to watch ‘Flog It!’ and kept complaining that the news kept repeating the story she’d heard earlier in the day. And it shouldn’t be called the news because there was nothing new on it.

In an effort to try and find out more about COVID-19, I started to phone people that I knew who were working as carers or in the NHS as health workers. This very quickly became a network of people that would take turns chatting to me. And I would speak to people nearly every night. And most of them, I think, I would now actually, very gratefully, describe as friends.

I think talking to them, and the conversations we had about what was happening in their lives and the changes they were facing, very quickly became a essential part of my life under lockdown. And this is how this podcast started.

Yeah, yeah, no. I'm waiting for a train, it's fine.

I'm all right, thank you. Yeah, just everything's a bit overwhelming.

I've just had a lovely fight with my knitting and managed to sort out a problem.

Oh my goodness, I didn’t realise it was that time!

Like I said, if this is going to help people to understand just how devastating COVID-19 is, then yeah, I’m more than happy.

Of all the stories, ideas and emotions to emerge from these conversations, the feeling and absence of touch kept cropping up. And this is where I’ve decided to start this first episode: touch. Skin is the biggest organ in the human body and touch is perhaps the most fundamental sense. The subject seemed to never be far away from a conversation I had with one of my regulars, Anna. Anna is a hospice nurse and this conversation took place on her day off after a particularly tiring series of shifts.

I see my parents every day, but I can’t give them a hug, I can’t do any of these things they need doing. My dad needs a haircut and I could do that, but I’m not going to because I shouldn’t touch him. I have a theory that everybody sort of nurses by proxy. So when you’re looking after people, you’re looking after people so that someone will look after your people. So I can touch my patients, I can wash them, I can comfort them. I can do things like wipe someone’s tears or help them have a shave, or do mouth care for them. And I think I would feel a lot worse if I wasn’t able to do that. Because I can do that for somebody, I think that gives it a little bit of emotional relief.

For me, living through the coronavirus pandemic has meant that the absence of touch, and in fact the fear of touch, I think it’s made me reappraise just how important it is to us. It simply had not occurred to me before, that touch might be crucial to nursing, other than taking a pulse.

I think it’s completely instinctive to touch, for instance, new babies. Or to touch anybody you think is fragile, and to hold them. I think a really important part of nursing and healthcare and love is just holding people, whether you’re holding their hand or whether you’re actually holding them.

It was only after talking with Anna that I started to thinking about my mum's turning circle. She has mobility issues and her turning circle is in reality an eight-point turn. It is accompanied by grinding gears and lots of cabbie swearing. Instinctively, I go to hold her at the elbow when I see her turning. And I hold her, I don't think to provide any specific balance, but what I'm offering is the prospect of a safety net, the potential of balance. And I'm offering that through touch.

My mum interacts with me through touch in a slightly different fashion. One morning I was making coffee, standing in the corner of the kitchen, lurking by the kettle. I hear a noise, I turn around, and I see a five-foot four-inch great-grandmother in her pyjamas and bed socks holding out her walking stick, pointed directly at me. “Bollocks,” she said. “Another couple of seconds and I would have got you.”

This is George, who works with elderly patients in major trauma. His analysis of touch is slightly less stick-wavy.

I think it’s an important part of being a doctor, being able to touch people. Not just to examine them, just human contact can make a difference to your consultation and to patient and doctor interactions. One of the best geriatricians I worked for when I was training is a huge man and quite intimidating when you look at him. He’s seven foot or something. But he used to hold everyone’s hand when he was going around and talking to them.

Just the process of having some human contact, you could see … I witnessed what it could do to people. It could make people much more relaxed and express themselves better and tell the doctor really what they were worried about.

I love that story: there’s something wonderful about a seven-foot man holding someone’s hand to find out how they’re feeling. And I suppose I like it because it flies in the face of my instinctive reaction, which is if a seven-foot stranger held my hand and said, “How are you feeling?” I’d say, “I’m feeling whatever you want, mate.”

This is my friend Jackie; she is a London-based GP. She talks about care, touch and the diagnostic aspect of it.

I’m quite a tactile person in normal times. I get a lot of people coming in with stress, mental health problems, and so on. Without thinking about it, I put my hand on their arm. Sometimes I even hug people – very, very rarely and they usually initiate it. But all of that is completely gone, so there’s a huge loss there because just lightly putting your hand on somebody’s arm, just leaving it there and taking it away again, it communicates so much more than you can ever communicate with words, I think.

I had a young woman in with a breast lump. We always examine any young woman with a breast lump. And I was wearing gloves when I was examining her and I was thinking, “I can’t … Actually, I can’t tell whether she’s got a breast lump if I’ve got my gloves on.” If you think about fine touch through plastic gloves, if you’ve got plastic gloves on, even if they’re the thinnest ones. You should try it yourself, you haven’t got the same fine touch that you’ve got if you’ve just got your fingertips. It’s just not the same.

I did, in the end, yeah. We talked about it and I did. Because actually, this is not safe. She obviously had come in wanting a proper examination, so we talked about it; that was fine. And then I washed my hands. I washed my hands before I put the gloves on anyway, but I washed them and then I washed them afterwards.

I didn’t, and it was fine. So it was fine, I couldn’t find anything.

One thing I should have explained about my mum is she was a nurse, and if anything happened on your street when I was younger, people used to rush to see her before heading in to A&E or to go to the doctor. One more than one occasion, a bottle of Sanatogen wine and a little thank-you note appeared on our doorstep.

I’ve actually got this rather lovely photograph of my mum in her 20s, in her nurse’s uniform. It’s one of those black-and-white photographs, and she stares into the distance, off to one side, looking sort of optimistic into the future. And she actually looks like one of those worker heroes from a Soviet poster. 

Our time together in lockdown has given me a chance to talk to her again about her nursing experiences. I think probably one of my favourite stories is how she learned sign language at school and then used it in the ward with deaf and blind patients. She would take a patient’s hand and spell out the letters with her fingers. Taking one of their hands, she might brush her hand upwards along the open palm: H. Then she might touch the tip of their middle finger with her finger: I. “Hi.” A simple drawing of the letter T on someone’s palm would often elicit the words, “White, two sugars please, love.”

I have a person I talk to quite a lot who is a dementia nurse. I met her three years ago when I was researching a show to celebrate the NHS’s 70th birthday. Her name is Jules, and she was one of the first people that I called. This is what she says.

I mean, I know from my experiences of nursing in acute that touch is one of the most important forms of communication – actually the most important. You can take someone’s hand who's really distressed, who is looking around the room everywhere, but if you take their hand, they can calm down. Nine times out of ten, someone will calm down. They might not understand the words you say, but they’ll understand your body language and what you’re conveying. If it’s caring, they’ll see that.

You can kneel down, you can look in someone’s eyes, and holding their hand will get them, most of the time, to look at you. For you to have that eye contact, you don’t need words, you don’t need to say words. But I’ve sat with somebody who doesn’t speak English, and just being there to hold their hand, stroke their hand. I think it is difficult if you’re wearing gloves. I would probably take my gloves off, to be honest, that would be my decision to hold someone. Because you want to feel the warmth of someone’s skin in those end-of-life situations.

I think it also goes back to thinking about having that person’s relative there with them, or that main person there with them, and allowing them to do that as well. There are risks, but actually, if you wash your hands, if you take care and really think about what you’re doing, then I think it’s an option that should be there.

As I mentioned earlier, one of my other regulars is Anna, who works in a hospice. And she told me this story of one of the loveliest things.

Most people live in partnerships or marriages or whatever. So many, many people would normally have someone sleeping beside them, or at least lying beside them when they’re in bed. If you’re in a hospice or in hospital, to be in your lonely bed, I think, is a really hard thing. So just being able to lie next to somebody is really important.

At my hospice we have something called a cuddle bed, which looks like a normal hospital bed, but it has special buttons which can make it wider. And beside the normal mattress you can put in two long, thin slots. They’re like slices of mattress, so you can add those at the sides. So it actually makes it to nearly double the width, and that means that the patient can be in the bed and then people who love them can get on the bed with them and hold them.

I have to confess, I find the idea of a cuddle bed almost unbearably tender. And I think it’s possibly my favourite object that gets mentioned in this episode.

At this point in the pandemic, one of the things we do know for sure is that isolation, avoiding contact, and washing our hands is the best weapon we have to fight the coronavirus. So in theory, we should be able to beat this thing with logic, knowledge, awareness, and acting upon those three things. But these things aren’t an option for everyone.

One of the people that I speak with is Mike, who is a nurse in a care home for people with dementia. When I first spoke to him I said, “What kind of people do you have in your care home?” And he said, “People that the other care homes kick out.” This is Mike, on the difficulties of working in this particular environment.

Wear PPE, wash your hands, stay two metres away. You can’t really do that with people with dementia, stay two metres away. I’ve got a man who I care for who, every time he sees me, his face lights up. He’s got this thing for me. I don’t know why, we’ve just got this fantastic relationship, and he wants to hug me. How do you say no? You can’t. He’s not going to understand that I can’t hug him. He can’t; he gets a thrill out of that. He does things with me that he doesn’t do with anybody else. Like I said, I only have to walk in the room and he sees me and his face lights up.

Probably not very professional, but he likes to play-fight with me. He’ll stand there and pretend to box. Or he’ll pretend to do karate, so I’ll mirror the actions back to him. We’re not making any contact, but he loves doing that – he thinks it’s hilarious. Or he’ll chase me. Again, it’s part of our relationship and it’s part of what makes him happy.

Like shadow-boxing and games of chase seem to be an instinctive response to a patient. I wanted to know how that spontaneous part of his nursing fitted into the barriered world of COVID-19.

I’ve got to think about things. There’s only one resident that I’ll hold, that’s it, that one man. The other people I still hold hands with, I wear my rubber gloves to make sure to reduce the contact as much as possible. Our home has been fantastic: we lost, I’d say, probably eight people to COVID, and not one of those people died alone. They all had somebody sat with them, sat next to them, holding their hand. And I’m very proud of all our staff for that. It was such a difficult thing for anyone to do. No one should die alone, ever.

And these poor people were so ill; it was such a horrible way to go. Absolutely burning up, confused, the relentless coughing. One poor gentleman was just coughing up blood constantly as his lungs were starting to pack in with it. It’s horrible. You just can’t get across to people why it’s so important we should be social distancing and wearing masks. If they actually watch somebody die, and it’s not a quick death, it’s a slow death. If you watch them die, then yeah, you might have a bit more appreciation for the PPE.

Mark Thomas has been a writer and performer for 35 years.

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Mark Thomas

@markthomasinfo on Twitter

markthomasinfo.co.uk

Host

Helen Atkinson is a sound designer working in theatre and live events. Helen has collaborated with Mark Thomas on a number of live shows including ‘Bravo Figaro!’, ‘Cuckooed’ and ‘Mark Thomas’ Check-Up – Our NHS@70’. 

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Helen Atkinson

loesjesanders.com/helen-atkinson

Sound editor

Nicolas Kent was the Director of the Tricycle Theatre in London for 28 years. His political pieces there included: ‘Half the Picture’, ‘The Colour of Justice (The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry)’, ’Nuremberg’, ‘Srebrenica’, ‘Guantanamo’ (nominated for an Olivier award) ‘The Riots’ (2012)  and ‘Bloody Sunday’ (Olivier Award for Special Achievement). In 2009, he directed the nine-hour trilogy ‘The Great Game – Afghanistan’ in London, New York and Washington. In 2016 he directed ‘Another World’ at the National Theatre and in 2017 ‘Mark Thomas’ Check-Up – Our NHS@70’. He has also directed productions in the West End, at the RSC, the Royal Court, and on and off-Broadway.

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Helen Ellett-James

Nicolas Kent

nicolaskent.com

Producer

Susan has worked with Mark Thomas for nearly 20 years. She is currently unemployable.

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Susan McNicholas

Franklyn Rodgers is an artist and creative director whose work explores innovative approaches to re-examining the portrait in contemporary visual culture. His work not only investigates portraiture through narrative, content and context, but also how their placement can open new dialogues in challenging the idea of representation within the language of photography. He has exhibited internationally and his work is held in collections at Tate Britain, ABP and the National Portrait Gallery.

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Franklyn Rodgers

franklynrodgers.com

@franklynrodgerscreates on Instagram

Photographer

Podcast

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Mark Thomas and his mother Margaret in lockdown

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In episode one of his new podcast, comedian Mark Thomas talks to health workers about coronavirus, care and the importance of touch.

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In this six-part podcast Mark Thomas reflects on lockdown life with his elderly mum while investigating the wider impact of COVID-19. Every night Mark calls health and care workers across the country for a chat. Humbling and often heartbreaking, these conversations reveal what life is like on the coronavirus front line.

The gloves are off

Coming soon

Mark Thomas’s lockdown check-up

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, images of viruses are everywhere. For a long time experts have thought carefully about how to represent the antigens that cause sickness. These portrayals range from illustrations of airborne germs multiplying to surgery posters that explain how individuals can help stop the spread of bacteria and viruses. Chris Mugan shows how the way we depict disease has changed since we first recognised the enemy within.

Chris Mugan is a freelance journalist with interests ranging from art and music to travel and design. He has written on these areas for publications including the Independent, the i newspaper, the Financial Times and Art Quarterly. Chris has also contributed to books on fine art and design published by Phaidon.

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Chris Mugan

@chris_mugan on Twitter

Author

In pictures

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Illustration revealing the ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses

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Discover how images of the antigens that make us sick have evolved over time and been tailored to meet the demands of different epidemics.

How we visualise viruses

Virtual reality is not just for gamers: it can take us inside closed museums and galleries, or allow us to explore historical sites that have deteriorated past repair. Marina Gerner considers the power of VR for the armchair culture vulture.

If you think about virtual reality, what is the first image that comes to mind? It’s probably a gamer in a chunky headset aiming at something only they can see. 

Virtual reality (VR) is “a set of images and sounds, produced by a computer, that seem to represent a place or a situation that a person can take part in”, according to the Cambridge Dictionary. It doesn’t necessarily involve a headset. Unlike augmented reality, where, say, a virtual lion is projected onto a real meadow, all of what you see in VR is made of pixels. 

About five years ago there was a hype around virtual reality, as companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google were vying to bring it to a mass market, but the uptake has been slow. This year the rise of the coronavirus and resulting risk of infection has meant that thousands of museums and cultural institutions had to temporarily close their doors. Could this be the technology’s moment to shine?

Not only does VR allow us to go to places we can’t reach, it enables us to see places we have lost.

Anybody can virtually step inside the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. As you walk across its sunlit wooden floors, you’ll see a vibrant collection of butterflies, laughing faces on Pre-Columbian jars, and floor-to-ceiling windows that reveal palm trees and the hazy city beyond.  

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Temple of Bel, Palmyra, Syria

It would, of course, be more impressive to fly out to Rio. But the museum was ravaged by a major fire in 2018 – reducing most of its 20 million artefacts to ash – and a virtual tour is the only way for us to see what it once was. Not only does VR allow us to go to places we can’t reach, it enables us to see places we have lost.

For two millennia, visitors to the Temple of Bel in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra would remark on its unusual mixture of Arab and Greek cultural influences. It looked like a Greek temple, rising from the middle of a walled rectangular court with Corinthian columns; its roof was decorated with stone triangles, like teeth in a crocodile’s jaw. 

This magnificent temple’s ruins were considered among the best-preserved of the region before they were destroyed by Islamic State terrorists in 2015, who murdered the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad for refusing to reveal where valuable artefacts had been moved for safekeeping. 

Since then, multiple projects have sprung up to preserve Palmyra through VR. One day the photographic evidence that has been gathered through these projects may well help architects plan its restoration.

While VR that requires headsets is more likely to appeal to digital natives, walking through the National Museum of Brazil is as easy as navigating Google Street View, and the reconstruction projects of Palmyra are similar to a film. But it’s not just re-creations of past glories people can enjoy: there are also representations of places that do still exist. 

Bookcase and concealed entrance at the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

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Bookcase and concealed entrance, Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Any visitor to Amsterdam will know that tickets for the Anne Frank House are hard to come by, needing to be bought months in advance. Now an app allows you to visit the house virtually and wander the rooms of the Secret Annex, where Anne, her family and their friends tried to hide from persecution during the Holocaust.

But can VR ever replace the powerful words of Anne Frank’s own diary? Of course, it can’t – and, wisely, this app doesn’t try to do that; instead it intersperses the tour of the house with Anne’s words. For anyone who has read the diary but hasn’t visited the house, this is the next best option. Yet it’s still Anne’s narrative rather than the pixels that draw you in.

Representing a house in VR is also very different from representing people virtually. In 2016 the BBC used VR to chronicle the story of Maria, a single mother, who is trafficked from Nicaragua to Mexico and forced into sex work.

The intention of this 11-minute-long VR documentary was, presumably, to create empathy – but the result can only be described as bizarre, at best. Maria’s first-person narrative is powerful; however, the cartoonish brothel-keeper does nothing to reinforce the seriousness of the situation. Neither do the Sims-like sex workers soliciting men on the street.

There is a fine line between creating empathy and ‘gamification’. And no amount of virtual reality can convey Maria’s journey without trivialising it. VR just isn’t the right medium for this message.

Roman Fresco, Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii, Italy.

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Roman Fresco, Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii, Italy

Ethical questions should never be ignored by VR creators. They need to consider who and what to show, the role of the viewer, and the relationship between the two. As a journalist and a scholar, I always analyse the choices that have gone into conveying a story: what is evoked through words, what can be seen and what can be heard. 

So far, most VR projects rely heavily on one of our senses: sight. This can have a vertiginous effect on the viewer, causing motion sickness. In essence, VR promises to expand two dimensions into three. Rather than seeing what’s directly in front of us, we can look to the sides and around us. And when it’s well done, that can make the experience more immersive than 2D. For example, a virtual tour of frescoes at the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii from 80 CE – where the front wall as well as both walls to your sides are painted with large-scale figures engaged in the ritual of a cult – feels deeply engaging to me. 

Outside of the TV series ‘Black Mirror’, it’s hard to imagine a time when VR can compete with reality. For me, Stonehenge from afar is always better than Stonehenge in VR. Seeing it with my own eyes, luminous against the open sky, gives me a sense of its magnetic appeal throughout the ages. 

VR is most powerful when it allows us to travel to places we can’t go. It can be a tool for preserving our cultural heritage, and especially the memory of what has been lost. But some things are better left to the imagination and our mind’s eye.

Marina Gerner is an award-winning feature writer published in The Times’ Raconteur, the Guardian, WSJ and co. In a true Renaissance manner, she prefers to cover a range of topics from culture, business and tech to having a single niche. Born in Kiev, her family moved to Frankfurt as political refugees, before she moved to London – which explains why she has a PhD on cosmopolitanism. When she’s not writing, she gives lectures on digital journalism and visual culture at Birkbeck University.

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Marina Gerner

Steven is a photographer at Wellcome. His photography takes inspiration from the museum’s rich and varied collections. He enjoys collaborating on creative projects and taking them to imaginative places.

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Steven Pocock

Article

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Moths and Butterflies, Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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Step inside Anne Frank’s house or explore the galleries in a museum destroyed by fire. VR brings history and art satisfyingly close when we’re unable to get there in person.

A virtual view of history

From animal-bladder skin to houndstooth check and sequins, face masks have undergone many revolutions in design over the centuries. Writer Lizzie Enfield traces their history in pictures. 

Lizzie Enfield  is a journalist and regular contributor to national newspapers, magazines and radio. She has written four novels, had her short stories broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and has been published in various magazines.

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Lizzie Enfield

@lizzieenfield on Twitter

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Operating theatre staff at Wotton Lodge, Gloucester

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The now ubiquitous face mask was first used by artists working with toxic substances. See how its design and use has evolved over centuries of plagues and pathogens.

A history of medical masks

While our museum and library is closed, you can still enjoy reading our stories and exploring our collections online, wherever you are.

Our ambition is to be a place where all members of our communities can see themselves and their lives meaningfully reflected in the work that we present.

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Being Human illuminated letters installation by Jochen Holz and Kellenberger-White

Wellcome Collection’s statement on anti-Blackness and racism

Dive into words and pictures exploring the connections between science, medicine, life and art.

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“But the one that scared and disturbed me the most… was a Japanese manga called ‘Uzumaki’.”

Read our stories

Explore our online installation, designed by Heart n Soul at The Hub to investigate how to make the world a better place for everyone.

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Inclusive Futures

Inclusive futures digital installation

Explore thousands of freely licensed digital books, artworks, photos and images of historical library materials and museum objects.

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