The horror of how we let Covid ravage our care homes
In Help (Channel 4), Jodie Comer played a young care worker in a home ravaged by Covid. It took a moment to register that she was wearing a bin bag. When we later heard a playback of Matt Hancock claiming that the government threw a “protective ring” around care homes, that detail said it all: staff so desperate for PPE that they had to fashion their own, hopelessly inadequate protection from bin bags and builders’ dust masks.
Writer Jack Thorne (National Treasure, His Dark Materials) intended this feature-length drama to be a love letter to the care sector. He also wanted to make us angry about the way care-home residents were all but abandoned in the early part of the pandemic. He succeeded. It was a film brimming with humanity, delivering a work of social realism without sliding into Ken Loach miserabilism.
At its centre were two great performances. Comer’s Bafta nomination is nailed on. Her character, Sarah, had a misspent youth but found her calling at the Bright Sky home. She formed a bond with Stephen Graham’s Tony, who, at 47, was suffering from young-onset Alzheimer’s. Tony could appear “normal” for stretches of time but also kept setting off to see his mum, forgetting that she had died.
Comer and Graham are friends off screen – he was a mentor to her early in her career – and they are so natural in each other’s company that Thorne could have written a drama just focusing on their friendship. Instead, he weaved it into the bigger picture.
The centrepiece was a virtuoso piece of directing from Marc Munden that followed Sarah over one hellish night shift. It is shot in the style of a horror film, as one continuous take. The soundtrack was so unnerving that even the noise of the hand sanitiser made your nerves jangle; a dying resident gasped for air, while one of those blasted recorded messages from the NHS played in the background: “We are experiencing an extremely high volume of calls at the moment…”
Towards the end, the plot went a bit Rain Man as Sarah took Tony on the run. It was OTT, but could almost be forgiven when it produced a beautiful scene between the pair before she was carted off by the police.
Somehow, it wasn’t a tear-jerker. A top-notch cast played the home’s residents – including Sue Johnston, Cathy Tyson and David Hayman – yet we met them so briefly that their deaths didn’t pack a punch. Perhaps that was the point – a reminder that the thousands who died in care homes were known to us merely as statistics.
The Government wants public service broadcasters to make shows that promote “Britishness”. On Wednesday, John Whittingdale (then media minister, now retired to the backbenches) delivered a speech written by Oliver Dowden (Culture Secretary that morning, co-chairman of the party by lunchtime) which called for more programmes like Carry On, Only Fools and Horses and Fleabag.
For some reason, they didn’t mention All Creatures Great and Small (Channel 5). But is there anything more gloriously British? Have the Yorkshire Dales ever looked so beautiful? In this first episode of the second series, there was a shot of Siegfried Farnon (Samuel West) getting out of his beautiful vintage car in the sunshine, with the rolling hills behind him; it was balm for the soul.
Nothing has changed for series two, which is exactly how it should be. It took all of five minutes before we saw James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) with his arm half-way up a sheep. Prior to that, he was doing a spot of locum work at a shiny practice in Glasgow complete with newfangled X-ray machine. But his heart is in Darrowby, and still belongs to Helen (Rachel Shenton). It looks as if their love affair is going to be a slow burn.
There are few dramas these days that could be described as gentle. This proves that gentleness doesn’t have to be dull. It is a delight. The bite is supplied by Siegfried, who is a softie underneath but gets the best lines: “If you have a point, Mrs Hall, I’d rather you got on and stabbed me with it.”
And there was a storyline as a vehicle for the comic timing of Callum Woodhouse as Tristan. When blind Mrs Tompkins mentioned that her budgie had never made a sound, then Tristan accidentally killed him, you could see from a mile off that he would switch it for a trilling replacement, and a bemused Mrs Tompkins would say: “He’s like a different bird!”
I’ll take it on trust that sheep keel over from stress-related calcium deficiency when worried by a dog. But for viewers, this is the most stress-relieving show of the week.
Help ★★★★
All Creatures Great and Small ★★★★★