A lot of actors struggle to perform sleep. They look too sweet and peaceful by far, when everyone knows that the condition is ugly and sweaty, and twisty and turny (or maybe that’s just me). But not Ben Whishaw. In the opening scene of This Is Going To Hurt, the BBC’s adaptation of Adam Kay’s bestselling medical memoir, he’s deep in slumber in the front seat of his battered car: gob open, neck at an awkward angle, all guinea pig noises and drool. Zzzzz. He looks blurry, a sketch that has been half rubbed out. “Aren’t human beings strange?” you think, taking all this in. Don’t our bodies seem to betray us even as they’re doing exactly what they ought to?
Bodies, treacherous and miraculous, are what this series is all about, and once Adam (Whishaw) is awake – his pager does it – they’re everywhere, leaking and creaking, swelling and subsiding, and sometimes breaking down altogether. In the hospital car park, Adam, an acting registrar in “brats and twats” (obstetrics and gynaecology), finds a woman whose labour is so advanced, a tiny hand can be seen dangling between her legs, a moment that sets the tone for what follows: a bloody and unceasing kind of chaos that doesn’t, perhaps, quite speak to the way most people would like to see the NHS. Here are lost swabs, crappy equipment (“why have you welded a laptop to a zimmer frame?”), sarcastic midwives and patients so stupid they imagine their terrifyingly premature baby weighs several stone.
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