Streaming on Foxtel Now, Foxtel Binge - Rod Bishop probes into THIS IS GOING TO HURT (Adam Kay, UK, 2022)

Ben Whishaw

Adam Kay has a lacerating view of the UK’s much celebrated healthcare system.

A former doctor in the National Health Service (NHS), his 2017 memoir This Is Going To Hurt has sold over a million copies and been translated into 33 languages.

Now he’s doubled-down and written a seven-part television series for the BBC with Ben Whishaw (never better) playing Kay as a young doctor inside an NHS Obstetrics and Gynecological ward. 

It’s a system under constant strain of collapse. Deserving and undeserving patients compete for doctor and nurse attention; medical equipment malfunctions; emergency alarms mistakenly go off every three minutes; misdiagnoses are caused by overwork, fatigue and haughty arrogance; and doctors can be found asleep in the carparks between shifts.

After realistic blood-soaked Caesarean operations, Adam Kay regularly leaves blooded footprints in the corridor and when he tries to have a private life with his boyfriend, his beeper keeps summoning him back to the hospital where another emergency forces him into yet another double shift.

As grim as this may sound, there’s a lot of laugh-out-louds in Kay’s sharply written dialogue and an endless fascination in the sinking-ship feel of the hospital. This Is Going To Hurt effortlessly transitions between very funny black humour and the pervasive and empathetic sadness most of the characters endure.

I say most because there’s one very different person on the ward, Mr. Lockhart (Alex Jennings), the Chief Consultant in Obs and Gynae who runs the ward and occasionally condescends to enter the operating theatres to fix problems arising from his junior surgeons, like Kay.

As cringe-worthy as he is, Lockhart’s medical competence is on another level entirely and Adam Kay seems to be underlining another important issue in the NHS. There’s a big gap between Lockhart and the rest of his staff and apart from his operating skills and medical knowledge, he never works double shifts, dresses impeccably and leaves the carpark in an expensive motor while Kay is still standing outside his car, manually manipulating his car windows up and down.

Other fully three-dimensional characters include the nervous, self-doubting medical student Shruti (Ambika Mod), Alex’s long suffering lover Harry (Rory Fleck Byrne) and the larger-than-life, straight talking, foul-mouthed, surgeon Miss Houghton who just wants the births of triplets over so she can smoke 20 cigarettes.

Adam Kay spent six years in Obs and Gynae in the NHS, but after witnessing the tragic outcome for one patient, he left medicine and became a stand-up comedian, a writer and author. Unsurprisingly, his one-man show has sold out for the past six years at Edinburgh Festival Fringe.