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A simple horror

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 17th September 2008

The Good Doctor (BBC World Service); The Dig (BBC Radio Four)

The BBC World Service’s drama department has been drastically cut back over the last few years and plays, squeezed out by news and current affairs, are difficult to find. But they’re usually worth looking out for on the website, or listed in ridiculously tiny print in the Radio Times. There’s often something a little bit different about them, an outside-the-box atmosphere, created for an audience that might not, for instance, quite understand what the NHS stands for in the United Kingdom, and the traumatic impact of the case of The Good Doctor (broadcast this Saturday evening and repeated on Sunday).

It’s ten years since Harold Shipman was arrested on suspicion of murdering one of his patients. By the time he came to trial the number of victims for which he was tried for murder had risen to 15; the total is now reckoned to be at least 250. The story was hard to make sense of at the time, and now a decade later it’s still just as bewildering. Not just that he was capable of such a merciless perversion of the Hippocratic Oath, but that no one in the tight-knit community of Hyde, just outside Manchester, made the connection between the number of his patients who were dying, one or two a month, and the fact that all of them were not that ill before they made the fatal mistake of calling for the doctor. On the contrary, he was a very popular doctor: ‘People felt instinctively that he was trustworthy and kind.’ This was mostly because, almost unheard of among doctors today, he would actually go and visit his patients at home ‘at the drop of a hat’.

Little did they know that by asking him in they were sealing their fate. Shipman would tell them they were suffering from some fatal disease and then take out his syringe, filled with a huge dose of heroin or diamorphine. In his trial he actually accused one of his victims, an 81-year-old grandmother, of being a heavy drug user.

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