Twitter has been in the media a lot in recent months. Surgery Live was the second of three experiments to come out of Channel 4’s cross-platform department using this increasingly popular ‘microblogging’ service in connection with television programmes. The experiment reflects the increasingly common habit of ‘Twittering’ whilst watching TV, plugging in to that behaviour in the context of a bold, educative factual television series – importantly a live one.

Twitter, if it hasn’t crossed your path, is a website from which you can send short messages (of up to 140 characters) to a network of people who are interested in similar things to you or who choose to follow your short messages or ‘tweets’.

When I first saw Twitter a few years ago I thought it was the end of civilisation as we know it. Since then I’ve come to see it as a tool in search of a purpose and I’ve now commissioned three experiments (Osama Loves,  Surgery Live and the forthcoming Alone in the Wild – watch this space) that have been about applying the Twitter tool to a worthwhile mission or purpose.

Surgery Live, broadcast in May, used Twitter to enable viewers to ask questions and discuss live the surgical procedures featured in the series. Viewers were invited to watch a selection of four fascinating operations live at around 11pm each night of the Surgery Live week. From open heart surgery to awake brain surgery to keyhole surgery, viewers were invited to ask questions of the surgeons via Twitter (or email or phone), all filtered via the production team and then posed through the intermediary of the presenter, arch-Twitterer Krishnan Guru-Murthy… A matter of seconds between tweet and the question being asked on live TV.

There is of course a long and honourable tradition of surgeons talking and teaching whilst operating and every effort was made to make the Twittering aspect of Surgery Live no more distracting than that normal medical training practice.

So viewers were encouraged to tweet away during the live operations, sharing their thoughts and asking questions. The big difference from the few previous experiments in this area is that this was live TV and so viewers were able to make an impact on the actual TV editorial. Now of course there are echoes of phone-ins and combining TV with forums/chatrooms the best part of a decade ago (notably by Danny Baker on Channel 4) but what this new generation of social media brings is a networked conversation, which is global, searchable, tagable and open. In other words, unlike emails, text messages or phones, you can join in a discussion among numerous people from right across the UK and beyond – fellow viewers, experts, medical students, enthusiasts, all manner of interested parties – live and simultaneously.

One measure of Surgery Live’s impact online was that it ‘trended’ #1, #2# or #3 on Twitter every night – that is, for a while around transmission was the 1st, 2nd or 3rd most popular topic globally. Another is that by the second night, if you googled the word “surgery” the Surgery Live website showed up number 2 of 121 million results.

But to get a real sense of how the Surgery Live experiment panned out, I leave it to the words of our viewers/participants.

• philroberts: #slive this could be one of the best models for twitter, live interactive feedback brilliant twitter was a great enhancement to the show
• manpreet1: Surgery live on channel 4, and #slive, was a great use of a new format.
• bruceelrick: @wellcometrust it was a great success on twitter. #slive now 3rd most popular trend on twitter – pretty great achievement!
• J_Dizzle_: just watched heart surgery live on channel 4, twitter questions and updates.. very well done. #slive

Do today’s generation of teenagers drink more than past generations? Dr Naomi Cuthbert, consultant at University Hospital Coventry A&E thinks so. ‘Yes, it has the money to. I think society has completely changed its attitude to alcohol. The shame of being drunk in the street… That was a great restrainer and it’s gone… I think there is now a culture that one has not had a good night unless one has got absolutely hammered.’

The crew endured almost five months of weekend night-shifts in A&E, and came to understand staff frustration. Dr Cuthbert describes a typical case-load for Friday and Saturday night: ‘Predictable, very busy, loaded with an inordinate number of young people, most of whom either shouldn’t be there, or if they’re there their injuries are either self-inflicted or down to alcohol. And it distracts us from managing many other more serious issues’.

Sometimes a Saturday night can lead to tragedy; in The Hospital we see a young man die in intensive care, with staff visibly affected by his death. What must it be like to see such cases day after day? It’s not that doctors and nurses lose their sense of compassion – perhaps more that some come to ration it. Dr Cuthbert tells us: ‘Some visit tragedy upon themselves and some people have it visited upon them. One tries to show concern but undoubtedly some people are more deserving of sympathy than others.’

For the staff of the maternity ward in episode two, their pregnant teenage patients inspire affection and frustration in equal measure. Dr Gabrielle Downey, consultant obstetrician at Birmingham City Hospital, is frank about her concerns; ‘I worry at why they’ve chosen to become a mother… I worry that they really know what they’re letting themselves in for.

The social problems associated with teenage pregnancy have direct health consequences. Teenagers are more likely to smoke during pregnancy, are more likely to have complications during childbirth, and more likely to have a caesarean than a mother who’s a bit older. All teenage pregnancies are classified as ‘high risk’ to make sure that the girls get the level of support they need. Staff like specialist teenage midwife Liz Gibbs could be viewed as spies for Nanny State, but they are there to help the girls make the best of a bad situation. ‘You have to think positive, you have to look at what you can work with. This baby isn’t going to go away…’ With teenage pregnancy figures on the rise again this year, this film explores why it’s so difficult to get teenage girls to wait before becoming mothers, if life seems to offer little else. ‘I wanted a baby since the age of 13… I was having so many problems at home, at school – I thought if I had a baby, my mind would be taken off that’ one 17-year-old told us.

For episode three, we follow Heartland Hospital’s weight management team, whose patients are getting younger and younger. Obesity levels in teenagers are so high that experts are predicting that this could be the first generation to have a lower life expectancy than their parents.

And these teenagers want a quick-fix solution to their weight loss problems. Gastric band surgeon Paul Super’s operation has become something to aspire to for younger patients who’ve read magazine articles on celebrities losing stones in weeks. Young dietician Adrian Brown thinks that this generation’s attitude to the NHS is different: ‘They come as consumers. They do expect certain things to happen. Some of them do expect to be to get surgery straight away.’ And for patients who’ve struggled with diets for years, the idea that an operation can stop them feeling hungry is a revelation.

But the coveted operation won’t be given on the NHS unless a patient can demonstrate they’ve tried everything else first. As we follow young patients attempting to leave their weight behind, it becomes clear that the psychological dimensions of obesity make it one of the most complex conditions for the NHS to treat; patients lie to themselves, to their families and to their doctors about how much they really eat. ‘Patients will tell me they’re only having a salad a day, even if we get them to keep a food diary, they’ll convince me that they’re only eating 1000 calories a day, but the sums just don’t add up. Nobody tells us everything but the scales don’t lie.’ Gastric surgeon Paul Super told us; and we see a young patient visit McDonalds just days before her gastric band operation, despite being told she must stick to a strict pre-op diet.

We love our NHS, but it’s not in its power to solve these problems – it’s picking up the bill for the complex social forces driving teenagers to drink to excess, to have children too young, or seek consolation in food. Could these problems destroy our health system? The real threat to the NHS, doctors told us, is not a generation, but an attitude; the refusal to take responsibility for one’s own health. And that’s not just a teenage thing – we’re all a bit guilty of that…

The film – which documents Paul’s return home after having been sectioned for six weeks under the mental health act – revealed how like thousands of other families in the UK, the Gascoignes cope with a loved one who has a life-threatening addiction.

Did you watch Surviving Gazza? What did you think? If you’d like to share your thoughts on the programme, please leave your comments below.

To learn more about the documentary, or to watch exclusive video interviews with Paul’s wife Sheryl and children Mason, Bianca and Regan, please visit the official Surviving Gazza page on Channel4.com.

If you need help or information on the effects of living with alcohol, please visit the Surviving Gazza helpline page.

In a previous post on my own blog entitled Evidence of Body, I pointed out a special characteristic of this cross-platform initiative – that unusually you can see, after very little time, evidence of immediate, positive changes of behaviour. That observation was made with reference to the week-long series of Embarrassing Bodies broadcast in April/May, but the recent four-part series focused on teenagers yielded similar clear evidence of real public value.

A quick and pretty unscientific trawl through the comments submitted to the Embarrassing Teenage Bodies website – this time there were 11,000 submitted over the six days around transmission! – reveal actual changes of behaviour; the building of confidence around illnesses perceived as “embarrassing”; the prompting of increased openness in discussing such matters; reassurance; clarification; and the encouragement of peer-to-peer support.

On this page you’ll find a brief selection of comments that illustrate the sorts of impact evident across the site. There’s a more comprehensive list of such comments on More Evidence of Body (a post on my blog) or even better, take a few moments to explore the Embarrassing Teenage Bodies website itself to get a feel for what it’s achieved.

Sample quotes:

“thanks teenage bodies thanks to you i’ve had the confidence to go and have a std test.”

“This site and video is soooo useful and informative!!! I feel more confident to see my GP and look him/her in the eye and state my problem.”

“I was worried about how i looked “down there” but this video made me realise everybody is different and that it’s completely normal to worry.”

“GREAT show. It encouraged me to go get something checked out =) & I’m sure it encouraged a lot of other teenagers to get stuff thats bothering them checked out!”

“After watching your show, my husband decided to check himself one night whilst having a shower. To his shock he found a lump. He went straight to his doctor and within a week he had surgery for testicular cancer, needs to have a few more scans, but thanks to the show he managed to find it in time.”

“I find this so embarrassing… but i’m glad to know i’m not the only one.”

“i am so glad i’ve actually found this website, because it has really helped me reading all these comments about other people that have this problem.”

“these videos hav helped me check my self down below and now me and my friends have been comfitable talking to each other about our pubity problems!!!”

I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who watched the shows or used the website – did you feel they engaged viewers with the vital health issues covered in a constructive way? How does this kind of lively, colourful approach to preventive healthcare compare to more official, formal approaches?

Motivated by a desire to address rising obesity in Britain, Jamie has spent the last year visiting the town of Rotherham to teach a class of people how to cook. He also set up a Ministry of Food Centre in the town to give non-cooks a place to learn how some basic kitchen skills.

A fundamental part of Jamie’s campaign is the Pass It On website. So far, over 10,000 people have registered on the site, each promising to cook a recipe and pass it on to two other people. Jamie’s looking for thousands more to do the same and really make a difference to people’s eating habits.

As of today, the site will feature video recipes from Jamie’s Ministry of Food show, kitchen tips, news stories about the campaign, up-to-date information on how the Pass It On chain is doing and much more, including a mobile website that will enable aspiring cooks to access recipes and shopping lists on the go.

The TV Show would love to know what you think of Jamie’s latest campaign – have you signed up to Pass It On? Do you agree that something radical needs to be done to address Britain’s obesity problem? Do you think a series like this can make a difference and inspire people to get cooking? Check out Jamie’s Ministry of Food tonight at 9pm and let us know what you think!

I first became aware of the reaction to this subject when I noticed a poll on the Hollyoaks forum asking members whether they thought the way Channel 4 had handled this particular storyline had been responsible.

Around two-thirds of the posts agreed that we’d handled it well, although several viewers had also contacted the channel through viewer enquiries to say they thought it had been unrealistic. Others were concerned that portraying anorexia might result in copycat behaviour.

Most people, whether critical or not, seemed to feel it was an appropriate subject to tackle in a teenage drama. Given the recent flurry of debate about whether the fashion industry is behaving responsibly by employing size-zero models, this feels like an interesting subject to debate.

I spoke to the commissioning team at Channel 4, who had taken advice from Beat (formerly known as the Eating Disorders Association). They were very conscious of the need to avoid showing how the two anorexic characters were managing not to eat (for example there weren’t any shots of Hannah sticking her fingers down her throat in order to make herself sick), and had intended the storyline to show the dangers of anorexia – dramatised as Hannah’s poor skin, hair loss and ill-fitting, baggy clothes, together with the deterioration and eventual death of Melissa.

There was also a support line for viewers promoted after these episodes were broadcast, while information about the eating disorder was published on both Teletext and the Channel 4 health pages.

Do you have any views on the programme? How do you think anorexia should be portrayed on television? Do you think it’s helpful to deal with these sorts of issues in drama? Please let us know what you think by posting your comments below.