This Is Going to Hurt BBC One | iPlayer
Chloe (BBC One) | iPlayer
Inventing Anna Netflix
Starstruck (BBC One) | iPlayer
If you’re expecting a baby, then perhaps it’s best to give the new seven-part BBC One drama This Is Going to Hurt a swerve and watch something more chilled with less gore: say, the Red Wedding massacre on Game of Thrones?
Adapted by doctor turned writer Adam Kay from his bestselling 2017 memoir of the same name, and directed by Lucy Forbes (In My Skin), TIGTH is like a medically sanctioned slasher movie. The opening scene involves obstetrics and gynaecology (“brats and twats”) acting registrar Adam (Ben Whishaw), fresh from sleeping in his car, encountering a woman whose unborn baby’s arm hangs out of her like a bloodied spindle. As the series unfolds (all episodes are on iPlayer), blood, guts and placentas are chucked around by the bucketful; trainees faint into caesarean incisions; foetal heartbeats vanish; vulvas are mutilated.
As you’d expect, the carnage comes with socio-political undertones, showing the underfunded, overstretched NHS as broken. Medics lurch through drab corridors like zombie extras in The Walking Dead. Patients are sometimes stupid or racist. Nor are the staff presented, glowingly, reductively, as saints and angels. For his part, Adam is human, fallible and not that nice with it. He makes a terrible mistake and scrabbles to cover it up. Treated like a serf by his consultant (Alex Jennings), he’s correspondingly mean and sarcastic (“So near, and yet so shit”) to his nervous underling, played by Ambika Mod. Meanwhile, Adam’s personal life with fiance (Rory Fleck Byrne) is in tatters. A colleague wryly observes: “You should mention the gay thing at work. People might warm to you more.”
The result is graphically reminiscent of Jed Mercurio’s Bodies, but this time from the perspective of an unintentional bad guy who also does good… it’s complicated. The tone chops so violently between light and shade that sometimes it forgets to take the viewer with it, but Whishaw effectively embodies the bloodshot-eyed desperation of a macho-hours work culture where every slip can mean life or death.
If the medical profession is rife with impostor syndrome, then Chloe, the six-part BBC One thriller created, written and directed by Alice Seabright (Sex Education), is about embracing the fraud within in a social media-addled world where the heavily curated onscreen life is king.
Erin Doherty (Princess Anne in The Crown) stars as Becky, first spied obsessively scrolling though the Instagram-feed of Chloe (Poppy Gilbert). Chloe’s perfect existence (big house, perfect marriage, yoga, blah, blah) appears to mock Becky’s reality: an office temp living with a dementia-stricken mother. When Chloe dies, Becky restyles herself as art-world somebody Sasha, and infiltrates Chloe’s social group, including her best friend (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and husband (Billy Howle). What is Becky up to, and what was her relationship with Chloe?
Doherty gives a beautifully ambiguous performance in which it’s difficult to work out whether Becky is malignant or just messy. Her eyes shine coldly, victoriously, as she successfully navigates her new clique: an arty, voluminous dress here, a carefully calibrated accent there, laid-back entitlement everywhere. The real Becky keeps escaping through the cracks (hate, envy, need), but there’s honesty there too. She knows she’s a construct – a talentless Ms Ripley – but it’s still better than who and what she really is.
I loved all this, I sucked it up like a superfood smoothie. But sadly, a few episodes in (again, the whole series is on iPlayer), Chloe turns sludgy and formulaic, with a denouement that’s as unlikely as it is overexplained. While still watchable, it wasn’t a patch on the earlier episodes, in which Chloe is a study of social climbing mores in the modern era, with mischievous flashes of Patricia Highsmith. Doherty is superb, barely needing to speak: her intense, hyper-vigilant face says it all.
Another delicious impostor of the social media age arrives in the latest Shonda Rhimes offering, Netflix’s nine-part Inventing Anna, part-directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) and based on a 2018 New York magazine article, How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People, by Jessica Pressler.
Julia Garner stars as Delvey, real name Anna Sorokin, who posed as a fake German heiress, managing to dupe Big Apple high society, and (almost) the banking world into financing her multimillion-dollar schemes, including a Park Avenue social club. In real life, Sorokin was jailed for her crimes (after her release, she was detained again for overstaying her visa).
I was expecting an examination of upmarket grifting on a major scale, but unfortunately Inventing Anna is a padded-out mess. Despite being swamped by her wigs, Garner is suitably fierce and commanding as Delvey – demanding private jets; denouncing people as “basic” – but after a while, her narcissistic shtick (“My father will wire over the money”) becomes droningly repetitive.
Moreover, Delvey’s relationship with the journalist Vivian (Anna Chlumsky), presumably representing Pressler, is overplayed, as are the relentless sequences following journalistic process – we practically end up writing the piece with Vivian (I know we journalists are dead sexy and all, but Watergate this ain’t). Inventing Anna would have worked far better if it had focused on the flawed but mesmeric hot mess of Delvey, rather than on getting the story about Delvey. I was shocked to find myself bored and wondering if other viewers would last until the end.
The first series of the UK-based millennial romcom-sitcom Starstruck was an unexpected hit last year. Created and co-written by the New Zealander comedian Rose Matafeo, it followed her character, Jessie, as she blundered into a relationship with famous actor Tom (Nikesh Patel).
The six-part second series begins with Jessie not returning to New Zealand after all, and she and Tom continuing their adventures in odd coupledom. The script remains baggy, with Matafeo’s charisma doing some heavy lifting. Still, it’s a warm, easy watch. Minnie Driver reprises her role as Tom’s self-serving agent (“I recognise you from Instagram. You realise anyone can see that?”), and I’m sure we’d all love – love – to know who Russell Tovey based his obnoxious, laddish film director on. While Starstruck makes obvious nods to Notting Hill, the vibe remains zones 4-6, and it’s all the better for it.
What else I’m watching
Imagine… Marian Keyes: My (Not So) Perfect Life
(BBC One)
Alan Yentob’s art series profiles the bestselling Irish writer Marian Keyes. She talks candidly about alcohol addiction, depression and the blatant chauvinism directed at “chick lit”. Direct, engaging, whip-smart, Keyes never disappoints.
Love Is Blind
(Netflix)
It’s back – the second series of the hit dating show where couples meet in the dark and are then astounded to discover they might not have much in common after all. Preposterous it may be, but it’s also addictive.
60 Days With the Gypsies
(Channel 4)
In the raw, sometimes alarming opener of this documentary series, explorer Ed Stafford experiences the ups and downs of life with Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers, with outsider distrust and evictions constantly forcing them to move on.
