Florence Nightingale is a 60-minute 2008 BBC One television drama on the early years of Florence Nightingale, from 1837 to the Royal Commission into the Crimean War. Nightingale was played by Laura Fraser, and her father by Michael Pennington. It was first broadcast on Sunday 1 June 2008.
Contents
Cast
Laura Fraser as Florence Nightingale
Michael Pennington as Wen, Florence's father
Derek Hicks as Surviving Soldier
Zoe Street Howe as Queen Victoria
Andrew Harrison as Lord Palmerston
Lorraine Cheshire as Watson, Nightingale maid
Roy Hudd as Music Hall Barker
Daryl Fishwick as Music Hall Florence
Ben Stott as Music Hall Singer
Sam Maurice, Paul Moorcroft, Richard Kelly, Harriet Web, and Kate Joseph as Music Hall Performers
Robert Aram as Doctor
Barbara Marten as Fanny, Florence's mother
Catherine Tyldesley as Parthenope, Florence's elder sister
Ian Bartholomew as Sidney Herbert
Keith Clifford as the colonel
Paul Opacic as Richard Monckton Milnes
Chris Kerry, Cheryl Willday, Violet Foode, Wendy Patterson, and Debbie Rush as Nurse interviewees
Olwen May as Mother Mary Clare
John Axon as Orderly
Jon Croft as Sir John Hall
Tim Beasley as Fitzgerald
Sam McKenzie as Dr Farr
Dougie Chapman as Music Hall Colonel
Crew
Writer and director - Norman Stone
Producer - Roger Childs
Consulting Producer - Kenneth Cavander
Director of Photography - Michael Fox
Editor - Colin Goudie
Music - Jeremy Soule
Filming locations
Lea hurst, Derbyshire
Butterley Station, Ripley
St John the Baptist Church, Tideswell
Manchester Town Hall
Croxteth Hall, St George's Hall, High Park Reservoir - Liverpool
Reception
John Lloyd of the Financial Times found that the most emotionally powerful segment of the show was the scene where her father told her "God is in charge, not you" when she agonised over her shortcomings in Crimea. He called it "moving and powerful". Lloyd thought that the show's remainder was "uneven but in a good way". In a negative review, The Daily Telegraph's Stephen Pile wrote that the programme "was flagged up as a big revisionist drama showing the real Flo, but there was little in this entire 60 minutes that was not described with infinitely more wit, style and detail by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians as long ago as 1918". Aidan Smith of The Scotsman said Laura Fraser, who played Nightingale, "deliver[ed] her lines with gusto". The Times's journalist Stuart Wavell called the programme "remarkable not only for its poignancy but also for the new light it sheds on a national icon".
In a negative review, The Independent columnist Tom Sutcliffe wrote that it "a bit more lively than the usual church pamphlet" and "it fell down in not drawing a sharp-enough distinction between the music-hall simplifications of its song-and-dance numbers and the notionally more realistic scenes of the drama". David Belcher of The Herald penned a positive review, stating, "Writer-director Norman Stone certainly had his work cut out in crafting an arresting modern-day depiction of the nursing heroine of the Crimean war. That he largely succeeded was owing to his diligence in trawling Nightingale's own writings."