The opening scene of This Is Going To Hurt, the BBC drama based on Adam Kay’s bestselling memoir about his time as a junior doctor on an NHS labour ward, sees a pregnant woman doubled over in pain outside the hospital with a tiny arm hanging out of her vagina. It’s a brutal visual image and one I can’t stop thinking about.
The show’s subsequent births — natural and C-section — come with varying degrees of horror and barbarity. For me, as someone who doesn’t have a baby but is thinking seriously about it, the shocking part was that none of it (the blood, the gore, the agony) was dramatised to make good telly. In fact, it is probably the most realistic depiction of birth to ever be shown on TV.
