The award-winning 24 hours in A&E returns with a series of compilations featuring some of the most memorable staff and patient stories filmed since 2011 at King’s College Hospital and St George’s in South London – places where life, love and loss unfold every day.

The opening episode from St George’s focuses on the love between patients and their nearest and dearest.

89-year-old Sir John arrives at St George’s with acute abdominal pain. Doctors think it could be a ‘Triple A’, an abdominal aortic aneurysm which can prove fatal but need to run further tests. His son Jonathan soon arrives and talks about his father’s long and fascinating life. “When I was growing up, a neighbour asked me what I wanted to be and I said ‘a gentlemen just like my father!”

Sir John was a wine merchant with an eccentric approach to business who brought his children up in a rambling manor house where they lived a loving, carefree existence. “My parents gave us an almost ideal childhood,” says Jonathan. “Not material things or being spoiled…they gave us love in bucketfuls.”

When the test results come back, Sir John faces emergency surgery. Jonathan is stoical. He reveals he wrote a letter to his parents ten years ago saying how much he loved them and thanking them for everything they had done for him. “I don’t need to say anything more, there is nothing that is unsaid.”

90-year-old John is also in resus with his wife Iris and daughter Dawn after being referred by his GP for a slow heart rate. As medical staff carry out a series of tests to determine the cause of his unusual heart rate, we hear how John met Iris at work when he was a telephone engineer and realised “she was the one for me”.

Seventy years later he still remembers their first date and how they went to the cinema and afterwards ate beans on toast. But unfortunately, Iris now has the first signs of dementia. Dawn tells us that on the bad days John feels “he’s lost the woman he loves”, but during the lucid days it’s wonderful and John “has his wife back”. But whatever happens they always celebrate the anniversary of their first date watching the same film eating the same meal – beans on toast.

Meanwhile, 3-year-old Shane has come to A&E after falling off a trampoline at his grandma Marion’s house. His sister Milly thinks Shane is faking it, but it turns out Shane has broken his leg and it will need to be put in a cast. Marion delivered Shane at home on Christmas morning and he’s named after his uncle who died young. “Shane’s special…he’s our baby Jesus!” says Marion.