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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 Good Doctor was not a ‘play’ in the conventional sense, but rather a spider’s web of evidence from the courtroom, interviews with doctors in the practice across the road from where Harold Shipman had his surgery, a musical score by Neil Brand, and a fictional storyline about Harry, a taxi driver whose business also relies on trust. He knows a lot of Shipman’s elderly patients, ferrying them to the shops and sometimes helping them with DIY jobs around the house, and is puzzled when so many of them die without previously showing any real signs of ill-health apart from the normal twinges and discomforts of increasing age. He thinks it odd, makes a list of them, but does nothing about it. Who would believe him? A taxi driver questioning whether a doctor is doctoring his patients’ records.

The story of what happened (scripted by Mike Walker and beautifully directed by Marion Nancarrow) did not unfold chronologically, but revealed itself to us in a spooky, unsettling way. Gradually it became apparent that the deaths among Shipman’s patients were different. They were usually fully dressed, sometimes with one sleeve rolled up. The trinkets round the bedside, the disarray of a home where there’s been a heavy burden of nursing, the usual signs of a terminal illness, were not apparent. Such carefully accumulated details really brought home the simple, everyday horror of what Shipman did.

This week’s Woman’s Hour drama (Radio Four, Monday to Friday) was also based on real-life events, but of a rather different nature. In The Dig, based on John Preston’s novel, a young female archaeologist, Penny Piggott, is trowelling in a trench at the bottom of a garden in Suffolk when suddenly she sees something glinting in the sandy soil. Her first thought is that she might have dropped something, but when she picks it up she sees lying in the palm of her hand a golden pyramid decorated with tiny pieces of garnet and lapis lazuli. It’s the summer of 1939, and she has happened upon the first of the Sutton Hoo treasures, buried some time in the seventh century AD, along with the warrior king.

Compressing the novel into five 15-minute sections had the curious effect of turning the treasure hunt into a cliffhanger at the cost of diminishing some of the book’s characterisation. I wanted more of the characters’ thoughts on what lies underground. But the production was drenched in the soggy atmosphere of rainy August, and you could almost smell the soil as it trickled through the archaeologists’ fingers. I’d no idea that Sutton Hoo was discovered just as war was breaking out in Europe. Somehow this was reassuring. ‘So much of life slips by and with so little to show for it,’ says Penny. ‘I suppose I wanted to make sense of what does endure.’