The medical equivalent of The Responder: BBC1’s This is Going to Hurt reviewed

According to the makers, This is Going to Hurt is intended as ‘a love letter to the national health service’. If so, however, it’s certainly not a soppy one. Few non-British people who watch it will, I suspect, find themselves wishing they had an NHS of their own — where the mission statement could easily read: ‘We Aim to Muddle Through Somehow, Despite Everything.’

Adapted by Adam Kay from his own phenomenally successful memoir of life as a junior doctor, the programme opened with Adam (Ben Whishaw) realising he’d slept in. On the plus side, his journey to work wouldn’t take long, given that he’d woken up in his car outside the hospital, having been too tired to drive home the night before. Now all he had to do was rescue a woman with a prolapsed umbilical cord from the carpark, take her up to the labour ward in a non-stopping maintenance lift, prevent her from bleeding to death, perform an emergency caesarean — and he could get on with his day as acting registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology (or ‘brats and twats’ as it’s apparently known in the trade).

To his credit, Kay doesn’t always present himself as particularly likeable. He treats doctors even more junior than himself with Fawltyesque rudeness. He also takes a brusque line with any patients he doesn’t consider ill enough to be bothering him — although not, needless to say, as brusque as the one taken with him by the duly irascible consultant Mr Lockhart (Alex Jennings, channelling James Robertson Justice). Then again, as the chaos convincingly piled up, it became clear that This is Going to Hurt is the medical equivalent of BBC1’s police show The Responder — the author’s message being that a) no human beings can realistically be expected to do the job without suffering emotional damage, and b) we expect them to anyway.

At times, the first episode did stray into BBC piety. We were firmly reminded, for example, that public schoolboys are all ghastly — and, in the only truly clumsy scene, that racism is a bad thing. Happily, though, such moments were more than made up for by the crunching finale. Called in to do an emergency night shift after his day shift, Adam was soon faced with one of the patients he’d sneeringly dismissed earlier, who turned out not to have been faking after all. Worse, he opted to carry out a risky operation without calling in Mr Lockhart. And with that, both he and the audience suddenly understood that he’d been the one doing the faking, as his brashness and gallows humour gave way to the chastening awareness that his work really is a matter of life and death.

Also on BBC1 on Tuesday was Cheaters which, as an 18-part drama, might sound an intimidating prospect — except that all the parts are ten minutes long. In the circumstances, then, you could forgive the briskness of the set-up. One minute, Josh and Fola (Joshua McGuire and Susan Wokoma) were strangers at a Finnish airport arguing about who to blame for their flight being delayed until the following morning. The next, they were getting cheerfully drunk together in the hotel bar. The one after that, they were having the kind of sex only found (I hope I’m right in thinking) on screen: the kind where they slammed up against an assortment of bedroom walls while hungrily tearing each other’s clothes off — and without Josh even putting his trousers in the trouser press.

When morning came, he guiltily confessed that he had a girlfriend and Fola, less guiltily, that she was married. Back in London, they bade each other a sheepish farewell, before he headed for a bus and she for a taxi. But when they arrived in the same street at the same time they discovered not merely that taxis are no faster than buses — but (cliffhanger alert) that Fola and her husband had just moved in over the road from Josh and his girlfriend.

Of course, a fair degree of contrivance can’t be denied here. Yet, once it was in place, everything that happened next was not only believable, but also funny, tense, awkward (in a good way) and often rather sweet. When the show reconvened after the News for two more episodes, the pair returned to their respective partners with a firm resolution to ignore one another — along with the pesky suspicion that their night together had meant more that they’d ideally have wanted. And from there, Cheaters continued its nicely twisty progress, as Fola’s genial husband decided he liked the look of the couple opposite and invited them to a house-warming party…

At this stage, admittedly, it’s not obvious how the show can spin out the situation for another 15 instalments — but I’m definitely looking forward to watching it try.