Time off

Help was one of those socially awaredramas the BBC used to do so well but seems to have abandoned in favour of ludicrous, box-ticking ‘thrillers’ set on submarines. It starred Jodie Comer as a young Liverpool care home worker, Sarah, who is thrust onto the frontline of the Covid crisis, that point in the pandemic where Matt Hancock’s ‘protective ring’ resulted in some 17,000 care home deaths.

In the midst of one particularly harrowing night on duty Sarah, left to cope on her own, calls on her friend Tony, a middle-aged in-mate with early onset Alzheimer’s, to help her with a resident who has Covid and is struggling to breathe. It is a powerful sequence, shot in real time, and Comer and Stephen Graham, who plays Tony, are both heartbreakingly believable. Some of the sequence’s emotional power is dissipated in a final half hour that seems to have been flown in was, and is, an extraordinarily powerful piece of work.