‘You wanted to be a mother,” Catherine MacDiarmid’s mother tells her. “It demands sacrifices.” New ITV1 drama Maternal interrogates how true this is and how true it should be – two very different questions – as it follows the return to frontline NHS work of three female doctors after their maternity leaves end.
MacDiarmid’s baby was the result of a-few-nights’ stands with fellow surgeon Lars, who was over from Scandinavia and returned to his wife without knowing about the pregnancy. MacDiarmid, an ambitious professional (played with perfect flintiness by Lara Pulver) rapidly finds out how much her time away has cost her. She is behind on surgical hours, of course, but not allowed to scrub in until she has completed the re-introductory course given by a bored lecturer, who knows that this is just one of many box-ticking exercises with which the path to efficiency is stupidly littered. MacDiarmid has lost standing in the male-dominated world of surgery and is straight out of the traps trying to build it back up.
Dr Maryam Afridi (Parminder Nagra) is a paediatric registrar who is less sure of herself and her abilities to deal with sick children now that she has her own, and who, it is hinted, has had a breakdown or suffered in some other way with her mental health. Rounding out the trio is Dr Helen Cavendish (Lisa McGrillis), a registrar in acute medicine, who is back after her third child and is absolutely fine except that she has to use the lecture hall to pump milk and works on a ward with her consultant husband (Oliver Chris) and the smirking 24-year-old house officer, Louise (Elizabeth Dulau), with whom he had an affair during the pandemic.
It’s a fine and fertile setup, and noted theatre director and writer Jacqui Honess-Martin makes the most of her first TV script. By the end of the opening episode, you know these women in your bones. The alpha MacDiarmid – finding that all the ambition in the world won’t necessarily make up for a system stacked against you but refusing to back down, driven by rage rather than guilt or self-doubt – is magnificent. Especially after the female consultant who is her role model breaks down in exhausted tears because her husband is sleeping with the nanny, whose salary has put them in debt while her male colleagues sail on unencumbered because “they don’t have to pay their wives”, and she advises Catherine to retrain while she is still young enough.
Maryam is at the other extreme of the self-doubt/rage axis, and Helen splits the difference. She has to focus on getting through all the day’s tasks at home and at the hospital before she can even begin to think about what she needs and feels. The sight of her getting home from work and picking up the children’s detritus as she makes her way to the kitchen, where her husband has left two empty beer bottles, conveys the problems faced by many of us in a nutshell. Ditto the elastic hairband Maryam puts round her trouser button to provide the vital postpartum extra inches to her waistband as she hurls herself out of the door, but we need not dwell on that.
The women’s relationships with each other feel warm and unforced. It is a rarity to see female friendship expressed as a genuine support system rather than simply emotional chats over large glasses of wine, but these three bolster each other at work – primarily through rolled eyes, swearing and bitter sarcasm; briefly, efficiently, in between more pressing duties – as it is really done.
Maternal is also quietly political about the NHS – as any drama set today must be – and the strain it and its staff are under, but no one is portrayed in a saintly light. The show is formulaic to a degree, but has grit in the storytelling oyster that produces something rather wonderful. The three women demonstrate how the systems are set up, who they’re designed to benefit, the injustices they result in – the sexism, classism, ageism – and a mirror is held up to a world full of biases so consistent they have come to seem natural. This is a drama to make us question how much forced sacrifice is to be endured before things change.
