How I See It

Adam Kay’s new hospital drama is bold, bloody – and so brilliant that it hurts

One day, when I was about 10 years old, my mother came home and put a small plastic jar on the table. It had a screw-top lid and something red inside.

“Now that,” said my mother triumphantly, “is what I call a bit of a nerve.”

I’ve never forgotten it. It’s one of the childhood moments that stayed with me forever, like the day we got a computer and the time we returned from holiday to my grandfather whispering, “You’ve had some unwelcome visitors”.

You know, those memories you can viscerally inhabit, you can see them and smell them? They’re not just memories, they’re little time machines that transport you elsewhere. I know where in the room my grandpa was standing and which sports coat he was wearing; I can see the bumpy weave of the tablecloth we put over the computer keys to keep the dust off; I can hear the lilt in my mother’s voice as she gleefully delivered her joke. Thinking back to any of these moments, I feel 4ft high and I know my hair’s in plaits.

Why this one? Mostly, I think, because my mother didn’t often do jokes. My father was a professional crafter of them and, to answer the question we were always asked, very funny at home. (Unless he was in a bad mood). My mother was – still is – practical, scientific, charming and beautiful, an important hospital doctor and a treasured wife, but we didn’t particularly think of her as funny. Perhaps only because that role was so comprehensively filled by the old man, with his improvised songs and his love of anything cartoonish.

So it was a big moment when my mother, out of nowhere, unveiled this joke. A full-on, planned, practised comedy bit. With a prop! Astonishing! As if one of your parents were a musician and the other never seemed to touch the piano but then suddenly sat down, one day, and did the whole Moonlight Sonata.

Also, of course, we were looking at some human remains in a jar. That’s another reason it might have been memorable. And the two things came together in one incredible moment where my mother (having clearly improvised this joke in the operating theatre when the opportunity arose and got a big laugh), put the bit of nerve in a jar and brought it home to do the joke again. For us.

I should clarify that I assume the nerve had been removed for some kind of operative medical reason; I don’t think it was nicked for purely comic effect from a patient who was having his cataracts done. But you never know. I won’t ask.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I have known for quite some time that doctors have a dark sense of humour. Perhaps they have to, or they’d go mad. (I sense I’m more sympathetic than the average person to some of those hideous jokes that were texted between policemen, for much the same reason). So I was quite in my comfort zone as I settled down to watch This Is Going to Hurt, Adam Kay’s adaptation of his best-selling memoir about training as a junior doctor.

I’m very comfortable with doctors anyway, not one of those people who “don’t like hospitals”. I spent considerable amounts of my childhood sitting in nurses’ stations while my mother popped in to check on pre- or postoperative patients, and I find even busy and noisy hospital departments familiar and relaxing places to be.

So I was looking forward to this new show, especially because I’ve been having a weirdly hectic and stressful time lately and I felt that something medical would provide reassurance and comfort. Unfortunately, for the same reasons of busyness and stress I’ve only managed to see two episodes of the four that have been broadcast so far. You might say

I’ve been struggling to make an appointment with the doctor. Thank you.

I say “unfortunately”, because it’s absolutely wonderful. It’s so wonderful that, if this were an appropriate medium for swearing, I’d have put another adjective in after “absolutely”. (If swearing is something you’re good at, please reread the first sentence of this paragraph and make your own insertion. As it were.)

The writing is simultaneously hilarious, moving, tender and savage – impressively, fearlessly, truthfully savage. And it rises to an even greater level in the hands of Ben Whishaw, possibly the best actor working in Britain today, who gives a phenomenal performance as “Adam Kay”, our flawed, idiosyncratic yet relatable hero. (I used inverted commas for his name, in what I feel is an important distinction since I’m supposed to be adapting my own memoir at the moment, though I bet I never manage to oh God how will I ever get everything done?).

With one flicker of his face, Whishaw can convey great depths of humanity, repression and conflict at once, while always seeming like a real person. Like Alec Guinness could. I mean, he’s really terrific. Here is a coalition of writer and performer that works to perfection; I like thinking about how happy both of those men must have been, realising a vision together.

It’s a bit gory. Don’t watch it if you’re uncomfortable with blood or if, for any reason, you have complicated feelings about babies being born. It’s gory and it’s dark, uncompromising and complex. And funny. And it’s brilliant, it’s just brilliant. To bring this out into a timid, careful, joke-averse world… now that’s what I call a bit of a nerve.

Doctors have a dark sense of humour. Perhaps they have to, or they’d go mad

Possibly the best actor working in Britain today: Ben Whishaw in This Is Going to Hurt