The medical equivalent of The Responder: BBC1’s This is Going to Hurt reviewed

According to the makers, This is Going to Hurt is intended as ‘a love letter to the national health service’. If so, however, it’s certainly not a soppy one. Few non-British people who watch it will, I suspect, find themselves wishing they had an NHS of their own — where the mission statement could easily read: ‘We Aim to Muddle Through Somehow, Despite Everything.’

Adapted by Adam Kay from his own phenomenally successful memoir of life as a junior doctor, the programme opened with Adam (Ben Whishaw) realising he’d slept in. On the plus side, his journey to work wouldn’t take long, given that he’d woken up in his car outside the hospital, having been too tired to drive home the night before. Now all he had to do was rescue a woman with a prolapsed umbilical cord from the carpark, take her up to the labour ward in a non-stopping maintenance lift, prevent her from bleeding to death, perform an emergency caesarean — and he could get on with his day as acting registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology (or ‘brats and twats’ as it’s apparently known in the trade).

To his credit, Kay doesn’t always present himself as particularly likeable.