Adam Kay found an innovative solution to the usual junior doctor problems of antisocial hours, exhaustion and daily encounters with death, disease and dreadful patients: he became a superstar writer instead. This Is Going to Hurt was one of those monolithic bestsellers that takes up in the charts and stays there, seemingly a permanent fixture. It has been translated into 28 languages, won a bagful of awards and spawned sell-out live shows.
Now Kay, who has also written for some excellent comedy shows as well as Mrs Brown’s Boys, has turned his book into an eight-part comedy drama on BBC One – one of the best of the year so far. He has had the good sense to cast Ben Whishaw in the lead. Unsurprisingly, given that it’s a memoir adapted by its author, it is a sympathetic portrait. As an overworked junior registrar on a hospital labour ward, Adam is knackered but always does his best. You never get the sense there is anything other than a shining golden heart beneath his occasionally brusque humour. “So near and so yet so s***,” he tells an incompetent junior doctor, Shruti (Ambika Mod), early on in this first episode. But by the end she has redeemed herself, he has helped her navigate some racist patients, and he has proved his own fallibility.
