Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham are blisteringly good in Help, a scathing indictment of how care properties have been handled firstly of the pandemic
“I need to talk to you all about COVID-19 protocols”
I resisted Help for the longest time, regardless of all of the plaudits and proposals. The considered sitting via a pandemic drama wasn’t one thing I needed to do for the longest time and while I nonetheless don’t really feel fully snug about it (and hope there isn’t an excessive amount of extra of it to come back…), I ought to have been reassured that the superb Jack Thorne would do a wonderful job.
There’s no doubting that Help is certainly harrowing, how may it not be. The unpreparedness for COVID-19 was common however the callousness with which the social care sector was handled and the ensuing disproportionate loss of life price therein is a nationwide disgrace. Thorne relives this via the eyes of Sarah, a younger girl beginning a job at a care residence in March 2020, cruelly unaware of what’s to come back.
Jodie Comer performs Sarah with such extraordinary talent, stuffed with bruised naturalism and spiky Scouse humour, her bonding with Stephen Graham’s early-onset struggling Tony is a pleasure to look at. This thread of humour and humanity is what will get us via, it’s additionally what will get Sarah via the usually thankless grind of care work – the likes of Sue Johnston and Cathy Tyson bringing actual dignity to their residents.
But then when COVID-19 hits, lockdowns begin and appalling inventory shortages strike, a suffocating tenseness takes maintain which is brilliantly, nightmarishly, achieved. The sufferers offloaded from hospitals, the binbags used as aprons, the pressures skilled by the emergency companies, with residents principally confined to their rooms, it’s simply heartbreaking to look at their abandonment by the federal government.
A diversion into completely different territory within the closing third decompresses issues in a barely bizarre means, a tip in direction of melodrama that sorta undermines what has gone earlier than by way of Sarah and Tony’s relationship. But Graham and Comer promote it, the latter actually lacerating in a crushing closing monologue, making this a exceptional drama.