A series of outstanding and memorable programmes to mark 40 years of BBCtv

This programme, one of the most dramatic in the series, is about blindness and shows how by grafting a new cornea on to the eye sight can be restored. It includes a new interview with the patient who underwent the operation.

From the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead.

Professor Charles Fletcher on matters of life and death
Your Life in Their Hands, which ran from 1953 to 1964, took the Viewers inside hospitals - including, controversially, operating theatres - to watch surgeons, doctors and nurses at work. The programme's anchorman was Dr Charles Fletcher - now Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School.

Professor Fletcher recalls: 'Our motive was to show that inside hospitals there were a lot of kind people trying to get patients well. It was a kind of PR job for the medical profession - but it raised a storm of protest at the beginning, attacked by the British Medical Journal for "making people's flesh creep", and the subject of a debate in the House of Commons. However, the fuss soon died down, and the programme proved a reassurance to many people. We showed a number of operations, including one on the heart and another for the removal of a gallstone, which had a touch of unintentional comedy. As the surgeon got the gallstone out of the gall-bladder, it flipped over his shoulder and fell on the floor.'