INSIDE HARLEY STREET (3 x 60’)
BBC, 2015
““Engle at her very best – and that’s really saying something.”
The New Statesman”
This series documents Harley Street and the surrounding medical neighbourhood - a unique grid of streets in central London. The series looks inside the hidden and privileged world of private medicine, to tell the stories of the people who conduct their business behind the facades of the area’s elegant Georgian terraces. Laced with humour and studded with historical facts, the series combines observational narratives with interviews to tell stories from both the patients’ and doctors’ points of view. The films examine our attitudes to health and question what happens when the patient is a customer and health is a consumer product that can be bought and paid for.
MAKE ME BETTER
Ep 1 raises questions about the cost and value of private medical treatment.
MAKE ME BEAUTIFUL
Ep 2 explores the rise of cosmetic and anti-ageing medicine on Harley Street.
MAKE ME WELL
Ep 3 introduces practitioners offering complementary and alternative therapies.
PRESS
““An illuminating three-part series. In common with all Vanessa’s work, the setting is a portal: what the series is really about is character and stories, which prove to be variously touching, heartbreaking, eye-popping and unexpectedly funny”
The Daily Mail”
““Vanessa Engle is a documentary maker much fêted for her ability to wring wry observation and penetrating insight from her films with a deceptive lightness of touch”
The Telegraph ”
““Just as her earlier documentaries about dogs on Hampstead Heath or the world of weight loss were not so much about dogs or slimming as they were about people struggling to understand their lives, Inside Harley Street is not really about healthcare. Her study of private medicine is the starting point for an examination of much bigger themes about contemporary Britain – everything from our fears of illness and insecurities about ageing, the roots of modern unhappiness and the strength of family ties to our secret longings and our private hopes for the future”
The Guardian”
““Filmmaker Vanessa Engle’s observational documentaries have always been a cut above the rest, fascinating and revealing with a particularly human touch, an extra layer of wit, plus an unerring eye for the unusual”
Daily Express”
““This is the latest series from Vanessa Engle, one of the very few documentary-makers who could get billing above the title. She is the utter, unimpeachable darling of the ‘Tristrams’, the patron saint of W1A. And she has made some very winning films.”
AA Gill in The Sunday Times”
