Trust Me on BBC One: Beware the dodgy doctors in this hospital where you'll be lucky to get out alive

The second series of the BBC medical thriller goes heavy on the symbolism
Alistair McKay16 April 2019

It’s never a good sign in a hospital drama when someone mentions Harold Shipman.

But then the bad portents are all around in Dan Sefton’s post-traumatic stress thriller, which plays around with reality to such an extent that it’s possible to go for several seconds at a time without remembering that you are watching a contrived situation in which nothing is what it seems.

The setting is a spinal hospital in Glasgow, the James Stewart Spinal Unit. “Welcome to the Jimmy Stewart,” says a glum orderly, just to stress the point.

Why so much talk about James Stewart? Well, he was an everyman actor who famously had problems with an imaginary rabbit. There is some playful stuff with perception going on, but — so far — no outsized leporids. More to the point, Stewart also starred in Rear Window, where a housebound man in a wheelchair started overthinking the activities of his neighbours. And, at the risk of overloading the reference, Stewart was a fighter pilot who struggled with PTSD, though the condition was dismissively known as being “flak happy”.

Vulnerable: Jamie McCain is left paralysed after sustaining injuries during active service
Mark Mainz / BBC/ Red Production Company

So this hospital is a spinal unit. Our hero, the patient, Jamie McCain (Alfred Enoch) is paralysed, though his arms work a bit and his brain is addled. He suffers from the particular kind of stressful flashbacks that fictional soldiers get, where the post-traumatic flashes cut out at the point of culpability, leaving the flasher’s guilt or innocence in some doubt. So he’s vulnerable, feeling guilty, and not sleeping well.

Now, as luck would have it, Jamie shares a ward with Danny (Elliot Cooper), who is autistic, in the sense that he likes Doctor Who and has the capacity to know everything and yet still not be believed. Danny gets a lot of the Rear Window bits while Jamie catches the flak. What Danny tells Jamie is that the hospital has an unusually high mortality rate. An Angel of Death is at work. Danny has a Venus flytrap, which is more symbolic than effective.

So, Harold Shipman, let’s have a look at the contestants. Mostly, there’s Dr Archie Watson (John Hannah). “Don’t worry,” says Dr Watson. “I’ve heard all the jokes.” As a boss, Dr Watson is from the school of David Brent, acting as if a coat hanger is stuck inside his suit jacket. “I think we’re still deep in a certain Egyptian river,” he tells his numb colleagues. Eventually, the reply comes: “Denial.”

Then there’s Debbie the cheerful physio (Ashley Jensen). She seems completely nice, which is odd in itself. Debbie does not seem to be a suspect but she is over-friendly with Dr Watson, and this is likely to fall foul of the Dramatic Surprise Female Protagonist Act (2018), in which the apparently blameless woman did it.

Hospital drama: Alfred Enoch stars in the new series of Trust Me
BBC/© Red Production Company/Mark Mainz

That may also apply to Dr Zoe Wade (Katie Clarkson-Hill), who is both cheery and a bit carefree with the sleeping pills. Dr Watson interrupts a monologue about the more complicated sex — “Women, eh? The old emotional enigma” — to alert us to something dubious about Zoe, and how we must be wary of a recurrence.

And so it goes. Dr Watson doubles Jamie’s dose, Zoe gives him a little something, Jamie gifts him the Venus flytrap, and the plot becomes a bed-bound hallucination; a trip; a textbook case of post-dramatic stress.

Trust Me ​airs on BBC One at 9pm on April 16.

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