And when the hospital genre already seemed more than overexploited, a series like ‘This is going to hurt’ (Movistar Plus +, from Monday, the 14th) to give him a revitalizing electric shock. It was only necessary to apply the current of (true) life to turn the old into new and intense and overwhelming. More than three million viewers followed its premiere on BBC One. The critics have been full of praise and many of us are already reserving a priority slot for the series in the annual ‘top ten’.
‘This is going to hurt’ lives up to its name, but it also makes you laugh, and the jump between moods can take the form of fluid transition or brutal contrast. It is an impossible dance of emotions that was already in the book of the same name from 2017, in which the comedy writer adam kay reviewed his years (2004-2010) as doctor in public health practice. Specialties: obstetrics and gynecology, areas, especially the former, where contact with life (and death) is particularly intense.
So intense that Kay didn’t have to tweak reality much to turn it into effective fiction. Or much more than effective: as we said, overwhelmingly alive. But some changes were necessary, be that as it may. “It all started with the diaries I wrote while working at the hospital,” Kay explained to selected media at a virtual event. “A direct adaptation would have been like a ‘one-man show’ with me reading three hundred journal entries. We shaped a world and focused on a particular period that I found very interesting, when I had people working above and below me. my”.
This last detail serves to discover the various faces of Kay, or of the fictional Kay; a little cavalier with his inferiors and almost too helpful with his superiors, partly because of the insecurity that accompanies him everywhere. She is also able to face patients when necessary. “When it came to changing things, explains Kay, the most important thing was to avoid being thrown in jail. [ríe]. That a patient could not be recognized. If we kept the clinical details, we changed the personal ones. And I also changed a lot of things about people in my private life. There are people I still want to keep talking to me.”
Another Ben Whishaw recital
Everyone knows Whishaw, even if you don’t know his name. He has been the last Q of the Bond saga, Jane Campion’s John Keats (in ‘Bright star’), the voice of Paddington Bear in the original English versionor already on television, the protagonist of great series like ‘presumed guilty’ (the germ of ‘The night of’), ‘the hour’ or ‘London Spy’. Here he breaks with laughter or pain, or breaks the fourth wall, too, like that young doctor who struggles to do his demanding job well and also have a love relationship.
What attracted the actor to the project was his “authenticity”, he explains to the press. “Which isn’t all that surprising considering it’s based on real experiences. But Kay has also brilliantly put all of that on paper.” The author described the project as a “love letter” to the National Health Service of the United Kingdom, which does not mean that it is often rather a portrait of his miseries, even more important in 2006, when it was developed. the action. ‘This is going to hurt’ is closer to the raw British original version of ‘Getting on’ (about the geriatric wing of an NHS hospital) than to the glamor of ‘ER’ or ‘Grey’s Anatomy’.
Whishaw’s medical training consisted of “a few evenings with doctors who later, during the series, were with us all the time as consultants.” The ideal would have been to go to a hospital and feel its chaotic rhythms, follow the right people, “but it was not possible because we were in the middle of confinement,” says the actor. “So we played some afternoons with prosthetic organs. Ambika did much better.”
raw but cinematic
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Ben refers to the comic Ambika Mod, fabulous in her first major television role: the novice but direct Shruti, who first receives Adam’s criticism, but sooner rather than later, also his mentorship and friendship. If the rapprochement seems so real, it’s partly because the director Lucy Forbes prevented Ben and Ambika from meeting in reality: “We were going to do a rehearsal and Lucy said, ‘NO,'” the actress explains with a laugh. “She flat out refused, she didn’t want us to talk, she didn’t want us to be friends. I reluctantly agreed. What we see on screen is a friendship growing in real time.”
Forbes was not only right in the direction of actors. He has also found a wonderful balance between the nerve of the camera on the shoulder, which allows you to stick close to the characters instead of just looking at them, and more planned and eminently cinematic visual solutions. The assembly of selina macarthur it is a lesson in sheer nerve, genius and contrasts. Benedict Spence, from photography, wisely exploits color palettes. If we add the soundtrack recorded by JARV IS…, the latest project by Jarvis Cocker, we obtain an aesthetically and sensorially sensational series. This is going to go down in history.