medical
Marina Vaizey
“Wham bam, thank you, ma’am” might be one response to this polemical, wry, hilarious and affecting series of counterintuitive essays by one of the most original and unexpected thinkers around. Barbara Ehrenreich has described herself as a “myth-buster”, and her many books have challenged in an eminently readable fashion all kinds of assumptions that we automatically take for granted and never query, which may easily not only distort our attitudes but actually damage our behaviour. As this book’s subtitle, “Life, Death and the Illusion of Control” suggests, her subjects here are of the utmost Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When you’re hot, you’re hot. In the past two years Mike Bartlett has had the following works staged or broadcast: Wild, a play about Edward Snowden at Hampstead Theatre; Albion, a three-hour neo-Chekhovian state-of-the-nation play at the Almeida; an episode of Doctor Who, a TV version of his play King Charles III, 10 hours of Doctor Foster, and now the hospital drama Trauma on ITV. Of the last three he was also executive producer, as he is of Press, a six-hour BBC One drama he’s been writing about the newspaper industry.It’s an astonishing rate of productivity, to compare with the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Albert Serra has earned himself the directorial moniker “the Catalan king of stasis”, and nothing in The Death of Louis XIV is going to dispel such a reputation – if anything, he has honed that characteristic approach further, concentrating this story of the declining days of the Sun King into a single royal bedchamber. However, there is one new element: it’s the first time the director has worked with professional actors, which at least ensures that his film's studiedly visual longeurs are handled with first-class Gallic thespian assurance.Never more so than from French New Wave legend Jean- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oliver Sacks was the neurologist – and historian of science, and naturalist – whose exceptionally elegant, clear and accessible prose has captivated that almost mythical creature, the general audience, through more than a dozen books as well as many essays. Who could resist his narratives of patients who had, to say the least, unusual brains: the subject of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the astonishing musical savants who could communicate only through music in Musicophilia, or Awakenings about brain-damaged people affected by the infamous “sleepy sickness” (encephalitis lethargica Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“What if the way people understand the world is wrong? What if it isn’t politicians that shape the way people live their day-to-day lives, but secret business deals?” This is the question at the heart – and at the start – of Jacques Peretti’s new three-part documentary series. Now my understanding of the world is that big businesses are constantly trying to shape new and bafflingly complex ways they can mine fresh, rich seams of our cash. They’re basically looking to frack us at every available opportunity. Thus Peretti’s opening gambit initially seemed about as contentious as the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Trust Me made an eponymous plea to the audience. Its implausible premise – that a nurse might steal a doctor’s identity and land a job in A&E – called for your credulity. Around the broadcast of the drama's first episode on BBC One, sundry articles sprang up in the media offering supportive evidence that just such scenarios often come to pass for real.And yet in this medical case there was a kicker. Most impostors are motivated by some form of psychological flaw: grandiosity, narcissism, deep denial. Trust Me took a different tack: its fake doctor (played by Jodie Whittaker) was so Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Even the canniest scheduler at BBC One couldn’t have arranged things so propitiously. Jodie Whittaker was already filming the medical drama Trust Me when she was cast as you know Who. Trolls unhappy at a female i/c the Tardis will have their quips ready: spot the difference between a woman who passes herself as a doctor and a woman who passes herself off as a Doctor.Trust Me, among other things, is a timely shop window for Whittaker’s abilities. The plot requires her to play her own private game of doctors and nurses. At the start she’s Cath Hardacre, a ballsy ward sister who makes the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The little-known Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis is the Maudie of the title of Aisling Walsh's grim-faced biopic, which feels frustratingly incomplete where it really counts. Sally Hawkins's committed occupancy of this sweet-faced if largely woebegone soul compels attention, to be sure, but can't forestall the somewhat colour-by-numbers approach of the director Aisling Walsh: a movie given over to art all but demands more art of its own. I confess to never having heard of Lewis, though it's certainly interesting to note that one of her purchasers way back when was Richard Nixon, of all Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The title gave us the true-life plot: this was a grandson’s filmed narrative of something that will touch us all, through acquaintance, friend, family and perhaps ourselves falling victim to some form of dementia. It's a word that covers a myriad of conditions, all of them affecting the mind.This was not a factual documentary examining the disease, but a specific family story which is not really typical nor stereotyped. The grandson, Dominic Sivyer, showed us affecting family films of himself as a young boy of seven or eight, and how his grandfather Tom had become the most important man in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Is it true that the blob of jelly resembling convoluted grey matter that we carry around in our skulls is really what we are? And how we are, and why? This is the profound question that is obliquely omnipresent in Henry Marsh’s second book on his life as a neurosurgeon as he describes his encounters with this physical part of us that seems to be, well, us. As he pithily puts it in his last pages, he does not believe in an afterlife: “I am a neurosurgeon. I know that everything I think and feel, consciously or unconsciously, is the electrochemical activity of my billions of brain cells… When Read more ...
Saskia Baron
How do you tell a story as complex as the eugenics movement, which is pursued afresh in writer-director Stephen Unwin's new play All Our Children? Its idealistic origins lie in Britain with Francis Galton in 1883, before leading to forced sterilisation of the disabled in several countries, starting in America in the 1920s and continung in Sweden into the 1970s; its legacy is today’s screening for conditions such as Down Syndrome.One way is to focus on eugenics’ nadir in Nazi Germany, when mentally and physically disabled children and adults were deemed "lives unworthy of life". Unwin, a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Three teenage boys meet at dawn. One of them, blonde and beautiful Simon (Gabin Verdet), jumps out of his girlfriend’s window and rides his bike through the dark Lyon streets to meet the others in their van. They drive almost silently to the beach, put on wetsuits and catch waves. A grey sea, a grey sky: we can hardly see where foam ends and cloud begins. It’s mesmerising, wordless, and the camerawork is superb, as is Alexandre Desplat’s score. We’re inside the curl of the wave, as immersed in it as Simon. Then the surfer dudes are back in the van, exhausted, on the road home. It ripples Read more ...