Call The Doctor:This Is Going To Hurt.

Torn back passages, caesarian sections, the cutting of umbilical cords, scalpels, foreceps, a babies hand poking out of you know where, degloving (don't ask), and blood. Lots and lots of blood. Babies covered in blood, mothers covered in blood, and doctors covered in blood.

Some of the images in This Is Going To Hurt (BBC1/iPlayer, originally shown February and March of 2022, directed by Tom Kingsley and Lucy Forbes, and based on Adam Kay's book which I'd read, and enjoyed, on holiday in Cyprus in Xmas 2018) are a bit icky. There's a lot for a wimp like me to be squeamish about. At times I had to watch through my fingers. At times I had turn away from the screen.

But what's really disgusting is just how low we, as a country - under successive governments, have let the NHS sink. Forget flag, wars, and GDP, the NHS should be one of the things we are most proud of in our country. If not, all that clapping on the doorstep during the first lockdown now looks very hypocritical.

This Is Going To Hurt in set in 2006 when the UK was under a Labour government and things were bad enough then. But, after thirteen years of a Tory government who never wanted the NHS to exist in the first place and are desperate to run it down and blame the doctors and nurses who work there, it is, even if Rishi Sunak won't admit it, in crisis. It might not last much longer. It certainly seems unlikely to survive if the Tories win the next election.

So it seemed a good time to dive in and finally watch the thing. Set in London, This Is Going To Hurt is a drama about a group of junior doctors working in the obstetrics and gynaecology department of a large hospital. "Brats and twats" as our chief protagonist Adam (Ben Whishaw) himself calls it.

That's typical of Adam. He's a funny guy but sometimes his attempts at comedy become inappropriate. It makes the show work better (as it did the book) but his use of humour as a defence mechanism doesn't always win him the praise of either his colleagues or (some of his) patients.

You can see why he would behave that like though. He's stressed beyond belief, he sleeps in his car, deals with racist patients and time wasters, and constantly gets splashed by bodily fluids and, as he remarks in one of the scenes of fourth wall breaking that are constant in This Is Going To Hurt, "not even the fun kind". His personal and social lives are hugely affected by the constant demands of the job. Adam may not always be a likeable character but he is a, mostly, believable one.

His colleague Shruti (Ambika Mod) is a struggling trainee doctor whom Adam tries, in his unorthodox way, to support. She works long shifts and when she's not working she's got her head in study books. When another hospital staff member, Ben (Michael Workeye), asks her out on a date you can tell she's interested, at least a bit, but she just doesn't have any spare time.

You can't help liking Shruti. You can't help gunning for her and you can't help feeling for her when the pressure starts getting to her. It's not quite so easy to side with Adam and Shruti's boss. Nigel (Alex Jennings) is a stickler for the rules. A suit guy who drives a sports car and takes expensive holidays. He gives Adam a hard time, often not unreasonably, but he also appears to have Adam's back when it really comes to it.

Or does he? Adam doesn't seem sure. Other colleagues he has more faith in. Tracy (Michele Austin) is so trusted by Adam that he claims he'd let her sew up his sister's perineum. Tracy doesn't take any shit off anyone and nor does consultant Vicky Houghton (Ashley McGuire) who is something of a force of nature. Vicky is foul mouthed but friendly (except, sometimes, to Adam) and sings Bob Marley songs to women while they're giving birth.

Elsewhere in the wider team there's receptionist Ria (Philippa Dunne), the self-explanatory name non-reassuring Trace (Josie Walker), and fellow junior doctor Julian (Kadiff Kirwan). He seems to have an on/off rivalry with Adam and certainly appears to enjoy a better relationship with boss Nigel. To the point of appearing to be Nigel's golden boy.

In his home and family life, Adam struggles to be open about his stresses with his handsome, patient, and understanding boyfriend Harry (Rory Fleck-Byrne). Harry loves to make fajitas but he also loves Adam and Adam him. If only Adam would tell him the truth.

Adam also finds his job causes him to let down his best friend Greg (Tom Durant Pritchard). Greg's marrying snobby Emma (Alice Orr-Ewing) and Adam's supposed to be organising the stag night. One that involves pints of gin, drinking sambuca from shoes, and wearing t-shirts with the legend ONE LAST NIGHT OF PUSSY emblazoned across the chest.

A good look for Adam when he's called back to the hospital in an emergency. Perhaps the relationship that Adam suffers with the most is the one has with his mother, Veronique (Harriet Walter). That's less to do with his job and more because Veronique is awful. Affected, critical, demanding, and if not completely homophobic then certainly in absolute denial about her son's homosexuality.

At times it seems he has better relations with his patients than with his mum. There's grouchy but funny Magda (Sara Kestelman) and there's Erika (Hannah Onslow) who babies life Adam saves. She buys him a WORLD'S BEST DOCTOR mug but when she makes a complaint about the hospital that complaint is turned into one about Adam.

When another complaint is received about Adam he starts to seriously worry if he'll be struck off. The fact that it's an "anonymous" complaint means it's almost certainly come from one of his colleagues and he soon becomes understandably paranoid about this. Who would do this to him?

In This Is Going To Hurt, you genuinely feel the pain of the medical staff when they believe they have failed a patient. It's not a job one can easily switch off from. There's lots of coffee in polystyrene cups, lots of snatched - or uneaten - meals, lots of yawning, lots of worrying about how much things cost and some very pointed remarks about private health care. Not least when Adam takes some extra work at a private health care facility and runs into Mrs Mullender (Sophie Winkleman - Big Suze in Peep Show!) who seems more concerned with what pillows her bed has and why they're serving asparagus out of season than the actual health care she, and her soon to be born baby, are receiving.

There is, of course, lots of funny stuff to balance out the very tense stuff. There are people presenting with itchy teeth and spotty tongues and there's a whole host of unusual things that Adam finds himself having to pull out of ladies vaginas. One young lady has got bottle of her own mum's piss stuck up there (to try and cheat a drug test), an octogenarian woman has got a half a box of KFC up hers, and at one point Adam retrieves a Kinder egg from where no Kinder egg should really be.

It turns out the surprise toy inside the egg is an engagement ring. What a proposal. Readers, she said yes. There's also a baby given the name Lasagne and another one called Mist. Which more than makes up for the discomfiting scenes where Adam hallucinates dead babies in his fridge and elsewhere.

The whole thing rattles along pretty quickly and there's a decent enough soundtrack which includes The National, The Rapture, Maximo Park, The Libertines, Florence & The Machine, Franz Ferdinand, Villagers, The Magnetic Fields, Sea Power, Death In Vegas, Sophie Ellis Bextor, Radiohead, The Maccabees, Ray Lamontangne, and The Human Beingz. Jarvis Cocker does the official theme music and, best of all, we get treated to an airing of Lee Hazlewood's My Autumn's Done Come.

This Is Going To Hurt is enjoyable when it's funny and it's righteous (and right) when it's politically motivated but it's when it gets personal it's at its most affecting. Towards the end there is a very dark turn. A sensitively handled one but one that had made me welling up.

Outlasting that sense of sadness though is one of anger that the current government, and previous ones, have allowed the NHS to come to this. Something needs doing and it needs doing soon. For a show about a team of doctors that assist women in giving birth you'd hope the show would deliver - and it did. That's something we can't say about the government when it comes to looking after the NHS.