THE
CRITICS
JAMES COWENTELEVISION
Just one
look from
Whishaw...
This Is Going to Hurt
BBC1, Tue
Chloe BBC1, Sun
Inventing Anna Netflix
Rooney Amazon
Why are programmes about
doctors so soothing? In This
Is Going to Hurt, the BBC’s
big new drama, there are
nonstop bloody slops, open
wounds, hands reaching into
caesarean cavities and tiny
sick babies, while doctors lean
forward and ask women if they
mind if they just crack their
pubic bone, before the
resounding SNAP while the
patients, in stirrups, shriek.
Just one look, however,
from Ben Whishaw, playing
sardonic real-life junior doctor
Adam Kay, with his bale of
lovely raven hair, and the
worries melt away. I simply
adored this series — it is a dark
and cynically funny whirlwind
through forceps, “blowholes”,
bodily fluids and prolapses.
If they hadn’t cast Whishaw,
Kay might have come across as
too much of a steaming, angry
failure and misanthrope. Read
any section of the book he
produced four and a half
years ago, based on his diaries
working on the “brats and
twats” ward of a London
hospital, and you come away
worried he’s a complete
misogynist.
“Same shit, different vagina”
certainly seems to sum up
his view of the job in the
show. Here, women are slutty,
moaning, stupid or racist, one
so desperate to eat her
placenta that she gobbles
down a blood clot. The
midwives are difficult, the
female junior doctors are
gormless; when he mistakenly
sends a thick, annoying
woman home — with
disastrous consequences —
it is as if we need to reassure
him. He appears to have no
specific interest in caring for
women, while assuming it is
every woman’s job to make
his life easier.
His mother, a cold,
unlikeable termagant played
by Harriet Walter — now
clearly only playing people’s
horrible mothers — is an
off-the-peg aristocratic
lemon-sucker who hates
the fact her son is gay and
pressured him into doctoring.
I loved their mirthless scenes
together. Kay is no longer a
doctor, but his heartlessness
and unshakeable quasi-
religious belief in his own
superiority hasn’t been
entirely wasted — he is now
a successful comedian.
In Whishaw’s hands I found
his negativity easier — he is
brilliantly funny and warm.
What an actor he is — as adept
at physical comedy as he is at
delivering one-liners: “I’ve got
blood matted into my pubes.”
You watch him and think: the
range. He can at once seem
hectoring and callous, lying to
patients. But that face: you
can’t ever forget he is soft
and human, prone to falling
asleep in his car and drooling
over his consultant, played as
a sharky, moneyed operator
by Alex Jennings.
This is a hospital drama
in which the patients
are little more than a
line of dairy cows
piped in for the
props department
to play with. There
must have been a
nonstop, dedicatedIn American hospital dramas
you might at least get waves of
sentimentality, but here it is a
war zone, a bottomless pit of
piss-stained exhaustion and
irritation — a show that could
easily be renamed The Trench.
From the first moment you
hear the distant rat-a-tat-tat
of the vicious, sarcastic,
outstanding script, you feel:
finally, the BBC has made
something to be proud of.
Special mention, by the
way, for the actress playing
Shruti, Ambika Mod — as Kay’s
long-suffering sidekick she
threatens to upstage even
Whishaw. Also: how can you
be that gorgeous and look like
Mr Potato Head?
When are we ever going to
get a drama in which someone
lives in a believable flat? In
This Is Going to Hurt and,
indeed, the BBC’s other big
show, Chloe, everyone, no
matter how poor or lowly,
lives in a perfectly styled,
expensive design concept.
We were told Chloe takes
place among successfulyuppie types in Bristol, but as
the camera panned over their
suffocatingly architected
houses and endlessly trendy
wardrobes, I had real
difficulty believing any of
these weird people existed.
Becky, a girl with a Julie
Burchill accent, becomes
obsessed with one of these
rich women. She scrolls
through Chloe’s Instagram in
the dead of night. It is a classic
cat-and-mouse thriller: Chloe
kills herself, so Becky sees
an opportunity to insinuate
herself into her circle,
pretending she is a posh
gallerist called Sasha.
I enjoyed this show mainly
for Erin Doherty’s freakish
ability to swoon between the
two characters. At first it
wasn’t clear what she was
doing, but once you’d raked
aside the messy plot, silly
wardrobes and improbably
beautiful houses owned by
people who looked too young
to live there, it was gripping.
In Inventing Anna we met
another female fraudster, thisteam of artists yomping
through plastic vaginas,
plastic stomachs to be ripped
open whenever a woman is
rushed to theatre — at
times it’s as if the
actors are simply
popping balloons.
The megastars
are, by contrast,
the doctors,
slagging each other
off across open bellies.And finally the BBC has something it can
be proud of with this darkly funny drama
If they hadn’t
cast Whishaw,
Kay might
have come
across as a
misanthrope
Healing power Ben Whishaw
in This Is Going to HurtCAMILLA
LONG
14 13 February 2022