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Review:
"Straight to the heart"
Anika van Wyk, Calgary Sun, June 7 1997
CBC's latest special may be short on action but it certainly has lots of heart.
The two-part The Fragile Heart -- airing tomorrow and next Sunday at 8 p.m. on GJQ -- follows a renowned heart surgeon as he discovers that the world does not just run on science.
He discovers life is also about feeding one's soul.
Academy Award nominee Nigel Hawthorne plays Dr. Edgar Pascoe. He is uncaring yet secure in his emotions.
After losing a patient, discovering that his daughter Nicola (Helen McCrory) is monstrous in her ambition and alienating his wife Lileth (Dearbhla Molloy) and son Daniel (Dominic Mafham) -- the two people who love him most -- Edgar begins to doubt himself.
This British doctor's spiritual journey is sped up when he goes to China for a conference and is confronted with some ethical issues.
He is asked to confront his patient, a communist leader, with these issues.
Ethics and business achievement have a head-on collision before Edgar's eyes and he must decide which is the right path.
Does he side with what is best for humanity, yet has no direct impact on himself?
Or does he choose to hurt his family and his own career?
Though the pacing is very slow and the editing could have been more diligent, the acting is top-rate.
Hawthorne plays Edgar in such a convincing and flawed way that audiences will constantly be swaying between love and disgust for this arrogant doctor.
Though Nicola is the evil result of her father's narrow-focused drive, McCrory manages to bring some sympathy to her character.
This is a tender story that is well told but those with a weak stomach should be warned: This heart surgeon doesn't just sit in his office all day -- he spends a good deal of time in the operating theatre.
"Sir Humphrey attacks China"
by Jan Tystad (translated by editor)
LONDON (Dagbladet): The actor Nigel Hawthorne, best known as Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Prime Minister", criticizes China. He has gotten involved in the fight against China's sale of human organs.
Hawthorne criticized the Chinese for removing organs, such as hearts, cornea's, kidneys and livers from prisoners that have been executed. "This is clearly a violation of human rights, and must be stopped", says Hawthorne.
He's currently shooting a TV-series for Channel 4 about the trade of human organs. The Chinese sell these organs to foreign hospitals, who transplant them into their patients.
The Chinese sales of organs was exposed by BBC journalist Sue LIoyd-Roberts. She was able to film, with a hidden camera, the negotiations of these sales.
Channel 4 is doing a three-part series about a British heart-surgon (Hawthorne) who travels to China to perform an operation on a political leader. While he is there, the students ask him whether he knows that the organs of prisoners that have been executed, are being sold to foreign countries.
Sue Lloyd-Roberts, who has been locked out of China, supports the TV-series because it will expose the violation of human rights committed in China. She claims that little has changed since her revelations. She doesn't think the British government has done anything at all to get the Chinese to abandon this activity.
