Fleming & Florey exchange roles; now its Florey who is the modest one

"Breaking the Mould", BBC4's docudrama on the role Howard Florey's Oxford University team played in the

Public discovery of Penicillin , does the impossible.

Publicly at least, Alexander Fleming was a the very model of a modern modest man.

Howard Florey, was always described, by his oldest and closest friends, as witheringly blunt and relentlessly ambitious.

Yet this take on Florey successfully convinced the vast majority of the many British journalists viewing the film that their parents' hero Fleming had feet of giant clay and that somehow generations of earlier Britons had overlooked the sterling modesty of Dr Florey.

If any of these journalists had consulted any one of the many biographies of either Fleming or Florey they would have seen a more complex and much more interesting story.

Simply put, there is much to strongly dislike and much to greatly admire in the character and actions of both men.

In terms that fiction writers and readers will understand, they would both be very much three dimensional characters, well rounded; always capable of surprising the reader.

Cardboard - even when well acted - is no substitute for the

multi layered complexity of real life...

Breaking The Mould over Fleming

The reviews of BBC4's docudrama, "Breaking the Mould" are in.

The verdict from the UK's scribbling classes is this : Alexander Fleming was lucky, lazy and undeserving of his past fame.

But these paid scribblers are usually sixty years old and younger - too young to remember 'The War' or even the Festival of Britain, and inclined to think that the Beatle-led Pop Explosion was their country's greatest ever export.

Why not - the events of 1962 to 1966 was probably the seminal event of their youth.

But Brits old enough to remember the collective British response to their displacement at the end of World War II by the USA and Russia and the loss of their Empire are all retired now and their response will come later, in letters to the editor.

Worshipful, unquestioning admiration for Alexander Fleming's role in Penicillin and similar admiration of his counterparts in

the fields of Radar and Jets was the key part of that collective response.

As these people retire from the work world and the oldest among them die off, is Fleming about to undergo a honest re-assessment by Britons of his role in the greatest medical discovery ever ?

AR hopes so - but we will wait till the letters from those readers come in.....