Producers worked closely with Gareth Williams, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Bristol, whose book Paralysed with Fear: the Story of Polio helped to form the script.

The Battle to Beat Polio will be broadcast on BBC2 at 9pm and is presented by former BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders, who has a very personal interest in the disease.

Her father Michael Flanders, of the musical double act Flanders and Swann, was paralysed by the infection when he was 21. He used a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and died early at 53 through complications caused by the disease.

Stephanie discovers that mankind’s struggle against polio has been one of the grand challenges of modern medicine – and a battleground between good and bad science. Some research won Nobel Prizes while other work was flawed or fraudulent, holding up progress and endangering patients’ lives.

Now, vaccination has pushed polio to the brink of extinction, but the recent murders of vaccination workers in Pakistan and Nigeria remind us that a happy ending is not guaranteed.  And even though polio is long extinct in the West, its memory remains vivid for the 120,000 people in the UK living with the long-term effects of post-polio syndrome. 

• Professor Gareth Williams will be giving a talk at the Hay Festival on Thursday 29 May about the history of polio. Further details are on the Hay Festival website.