Inside Broadmoor

The first episode begins with a portrait of Broadmoor – and its most famous patients – today. This hospital, surrounded by barbed wire and subject to high-level security, houses some of the most dangerous and deranged minds in the country. Broadmoor has become a byword for the very worst in human nature and is perceived by some as a kind of bin into which we throw the people who scare us the most. But what is Broadmoor really for? In 1863, Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum was born out of Victorian compassion and Christian principles as the law declared it immoral to blame the insane for their crimes and send them to the gallows. Instead, this unique institution, the first of its kind in the world, would provide a refuge for the criminally insane across all social divides. This episode also takes a look at some of the hospital’s first residents, including Richard Dadd, a famous artist who, believing himself to be controlled by an Egyptian god, killed his father, and Edward Oxford, who tried to assassinate Queen Victoria. We hear about the first head of Broadmoor, ex-military surgeon John Meyer, who implemented ‘moral treatment’ – a wholesome routine of exercise, work, plain food and fresh air. This unshakeable belief in the healing powers of virtuous living – a healthy mind in a healthy body – meant that psychiatric care at Broadmoor remained basic and unchanged throughout the Victorian period.

This second episode picks up the story in 1952. For nearly 90 years, Broadmoor had contained an extraordinary array of mentally ill criminals, and staff had experimented on them with a range of shocking and dangerous treatments. But the regime was essentially liberal and lax in security, and Broadmoor had excited little public interest. All that changed when notorious child murderer John Straffen escaped and within hours strangled a six-year-old girl. From then on, the press saw Broadmoor as home to Britain’s worst fiends and monsters. The public, meanwhile, saw the secure hospital as a place of danger and mental illness as a source of fear. What, everyone wondered, was Broadmoor actually for? Was it there to protect us from the most dangerous people in the country? Or was it there to treat and cure the most damaged of minds? These questions lie at the heart of Broadmoor’s story over the last 60 years. With exclusive access to key staff who have worked there, this film reveals terrifying crimes, brutal medical treatments, ingenious escapes and miracle cures as it tracks the hospital’s continuing attempts to work out what it should do with its patients. Idealistic medical superintendent Dr Pat McGrath was determined to reverse Broadmoor’s fortunes in the aftermath of the Straffen escape. He believed that the key to public safety was curing his patients, not high walls and barbed wire. We meet his son Patrick, who grew up at Broadmoor and counted some of Britain’s most violent offenders as his friends. Pat recalls growing up among people like ‘Mad Axeman’ Frank Mitchell, muscle man to the Kray Twins.