A simple horror

The BBC World Service’s drama department has been drastically cut back over the last few years and plays, squeezed out by news and current affairs, are difficult to find. But they’re usually worth looking out for on the website, or listed in ridiculously tiny print in the Radio Times. There’s often something a little bit different about them, an outside-the-box atmosphere, created for an audience that might not, for instance, quite understand what the NHS stands for in the United Kingdom, and the traumatic impact of the case of The Good Doctor (broadcast this Saturday evening and repeated on Sunday).

It’s ten years since Harold Shipman was arrested on suspicion of murdering one of his patients. By the time he came to trial the number of victims for which he was tried for murder had risen to 15; the total is now reckoned to be at least 250. The story was hard to make sense of at the time, and now a decade later it’s still just as bewildering.