The doctors who delivered my first child remain my heroes, although I have no idea of their names and couldn’t pick them out of a line-up. It was an all-hands-on-deck, get-this-baby-out-now, “crash” caesarean section, of the kind that is not covered in happy-clappy birth manuals.
As I prepared to leave the labour ward for the operating theatre, my husband put on one of those surgical scrub caps. “You look like you work on the meat counter at Sainsbury’s,” I said, in a feeble attempt at levity. “This is like the meat counter at Sainsbury’s,” he replied, ashen-faced, surveying the floor around my bed.
Our daughter was delivered about 15 minutes later, unable to breathe unaided, but these amazing doctors brought her to life. And then they were off to save the next mother and baby, most likely without time for a cup of tea in between. All in a morning’s work. Such is the territory covered in This Is Going to Hurt (BBC One), an adaptation of Adam Kay’s best-selling memoir of his years as a junior medic in obstetrics and gynaecology.
The book was wildly popular, selling 2.5 million copies to date. I was one of the few readers who didn’t love it. Although it was snappily written and an excellent insight into how hospitals work, there was an unpleasant streak of misogyny running through it and a sniggering schoolboy humour that no woman who has spent time on an obs and gynae ward – or “brats and t–ts”, as it is charmingly referred to – wants to read. Say, a description of a patient’s vulval condition as looking “like cauliflower florets, mate”, or the delineation between the work of midwives and doctors sometimes being “a greyer area than your nan’s vagina”. You get the picture.
In the role of Adam, Ben Whishaw has his work cut out making the role likeable. But it’s good casting, because however hateful he’s being – and he really is awful to his junior colleague (Ambika Mod) and to his patients, including an elderly lady whom he describes to us as “a total bitch” – we can see that he’s Ben Whishaw, voice of Paddington and an actor who can’t help projecting vulnerability. That’s vital to the success of this series, because otherwise we’re just watching someone be an insufferable smart-arse.
