This is Going to Hurt: Ben Whishaw shines in a gory medical comedy
Adam Kay’s memoir about his time as an NHS doctor sold about “a trillion copies in a million languages”, said Deborah Ross in The Mail on Sunday. This BBC adaptation of This Is Going To
Hurt is just as “gory, despairing, riveting, tender and insightful” as the book. Ben Whishaw plays Kay, a junior registrar grappling with the everyday horrors of obstetrics and gynaecology (or, as it is known, “brats and twats”). The show opens with Kay waking in his car, having been “too tired” to drive home the night before; very soon, the medical incidents are piling up. The seven-part series is “unflinching” in a way most medical dramas are not, “particularly in detailing the errors than can, and do, happen”.
Whishaw’s last outing was as Q in No Time to Die, said Ed Cumming in The Independent; it’s refreshing to see him “freed from the shackles of that claggy franchise into a role better suited to his gifts”. As Kay, he is by turns spiky and empathetic, displaying impeccably fluent comic timing. If they hadn’t cast Whishaw, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, Kay might have come across as “a steaming, angry failure” – his diaries do make him seem like a “complete misogynist”. But Whishaw is “funny and warm”, even as he navigates the “war zone” of the hospital, portrayed here as a “bottomless pit of piss-stained exhaustion”. I also loved the scenes with his mother (Harriet Walter), an “off-the-peg aristocratic lemon sucker” who forced her son to become a doctor. “The BBC has made something to be proud of.”