Quango – Andy Lansley’s Disembodied Head

Press play to listen to this while you’re reading for the authentic Lansley experience

If you’re in hospital these days and you want to watch a TV debate about the creeping privatisation of the NHS, you can do so on your personal in-bed entertainment system. But first, you’ll have to shell out five pounds to a Slough-based plc called Hospedia.

Hospedia own, control and mismanage the NHS’s bedside entertainment system. Obviously, at the rate of a fiver a day, it’s quite easy to be not-arsed about the selection of primitive games, heavily-censored glacial internet and freeview channels their system offers to every bed-bound patient. So Hospedia have hit upon a fantastic wheeze: part-infomercial, part-Guantanamo Bay. They video a message of the Health Secretary wishing you all the best in hospital. Then they play it. On loop. Constantly. Hour after hour. Day after day. From the moment you begin complaining of fatigue, to the day the blood test confirms it’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, to the moment the hospital porters wheel you past your crying mum to the morgue, Andrew Lansley MP re-iterates and re-iterates that he “Just want[s] to take a few moments to say that your care while you’re here in hospital really matters to me.” A baby is born watching Andrew Lansley. An old man dies while trying to figure out why Countdown features so much Andrew Lansley these days. A wine bottle is surgically removed from a lady’s anus, and there is the reassuring, silver-haired bedside manner of Andrew Lansley totally not judging her.

The message only stops if you register with the system. Registration is pretty easy. To someone with no mental or physical disorders. Of course, if you’re old, frail, or have taken a lot of morphine – none of which are likely to be common in a hospital –  this process is often more likely to result in you soiling yourself than you removing the loop from your field of vision. Short of installing handguns next to the hairdryers, there seem fewer surefire ways of getting those infamous NHS waiting times down.

Worse, if you’re sat on a ward with a lot of folks in a persistent vegetative state, there could be 20 Andrew Lansleys all gabbling in synchronicity, like some Bruce Nauman art installation about mediocrity. The PR company responsible boasts that the system is watched by 10 million people a year. Could Bruce Nauman ever say that?

Sadly, shit as it is, the Lansley video seems to be one of the few things that works in Hospedia’s ropey system. “The doctors considered me a dying man,” one former patient pointed out, “But when I tried to access perfectly innocent websites to inform my online friends of my impending demise, Hospedia decided that my death should be an unannounced affair by blocking every site I tried to access, crashing the system for good measure.” With the sort of self-awareness for which they are totally not known, the company’s search drones also blocked “all websites with references to drugs”, meaning that no one could research their own prescriptions, or indeed visit the Hospedia website itself.

So is the system a boot in the face of humanity forever and ever? Or is it just good, clean dystopian vampire-squid behaviour from a faceless corporate pocket-siphon? It’s difficult to say at this point. By 2015, expect to have to keep a stack of pound coins next to the dialysis machine in case the meter runs low. By 2017, Lansley’s face to start nonchalantly eating babies in upcoming releases, as the reconditioning process kicks up a gear. By 2019, expect all your surgery to be perfomed by Michael Palin, drunk in a baby mask.

Previously: Quango – The Cult Of Ron Paul