Doctor foster: is this the most shocking tv series ever?

DOCTOR FOSTER: GEMMA HAS SEX WITH EX-HUSBAND SIMON Dr Finlay’s Casebook was nothing like this and if Mary, the GP’s wife in Mrs Dale’s Diary on the dear old radio Light Programme, was often

“rather worried about Jim” just because he looked tired or a bit peaky she’d be absolutely beside herself about Gemma. Well we all are aren’t we? But nothing like as beside herself as Gemma

is. First things first: the doctoring. People are always complaining about GPs nowadays, how difficult it is to get an appointment and all that. Well spare a thought for the people of

Parminster where Dr Gemma Foster is head of a GP practice.  RELATED ARTICLES You wouldn’t even want an appointment with her, well at least not for medical reasons. In any case she hasn’t

been near the surgery lately. Her last bit of serious doctoring was at the end of the first series a couple of years ago. She saved a man in the street when he had heart failure. Since then

she has spent most of her time trying to give men heart failure – not just her cheating husband and the soppy teacher from her son’s school but millions of men sitting minding their business

in front of their television at home. And maybe millions of women too. Before Tuesday’s episode the BBC announcer primly warned us that it had “sexual content”. Ooh er missus, the opposite

of a spoiler. If you know anything about her you know it’s going to be with her hated divorced husband and it’s guaranteed to be something you probably shouldn’t try at home.  BBC Doctor

Foster aired its raunchiest scenes yet as Gemma hooked up with her ex in her kitchen In this particular case it was ripping off her own clothes down to her sexy black underwear and seducing

him into making a meal of it in the kitchen (with a hidden camera-phone recording it all so she could show his new young wife) followed by the full four courses on the dining room table with

both of them ending up naked. We know that their poor confused terribly distressed teenage son Tom is in the house, supposedly safely in his room. Certainly my first thought (and probably

yours) was “what happens if he comes in?” As it turns out he didn’t need to come in. He heard everything through the wall (Gemma isn’t Maria Sharapova but she isn’t noiseless either). This

was indeed shocking stuff, not so much the naked flesh – we have become used to that. It’s the emotional savagery and the feeling that Gemma is capable of almost anything. Doctor Foster is

compelling because sex is at the core of it but mostly because it’s terrifying.  BBC Dr Gemma Foster stripped down to her black underwear and seduced ex-husband Simon What’s she going to do

next? She is unhinged, she is a she-wolf and, played by Suranne Jones, she’s as irresistible to me as she is to her horrible ex-husband Simon. If media reports are to be believed television

audiences are pathetically susceptible to anything even vaguely sexy. Aidan Turner takes his floppy shirt off in Poldark and a nation swoons; Colin Firth emerging from a lake in a wet shirt

is said to have brought on fits of the vapours; Daniel Craig emerging from the ocean in his bathers is a trillion-dollar frisson. And then there’s the outrage. Did Captain Ross rape

Elizabeth in Poldark or was it consensual? Much debate. Same old, same old. What is different and dis orientating about Doctor Foster is partly that she is feral and sexually voracious but

mostly that she is a woman and we haven’t seen a woman like that before. If a man had done to her what she did to her husband in the kitchen on Tuesday there would have been the old debate

we have heard so many times. Is it right to trivialise sexual aggression? Didn’t it come dangerously close to rape? Certainly we have become used to powerful sexually driven women on

television – Queen Victoria for one – but have we ever seen a woman as dangerous, sexy and transgressive as Gemma? I think not. She isn’t going to kill anybody (at least I hope she isn’t)

but apart from that she’s as scary as can be. Mike Bartlett who wrote Doctor Foster also wrote King Charles III, a modern play about the current Prince of Wales, but written in verse like a

Shakespeare history play. He is very familiar with savage 17th-century English revenge dramas. It’s not just an aside that in an early episode she quoted William Congreve’s lines: “Heaven

has no rage like love to hatred turned/Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” Not for Gemma the Alicia Florrick route in the American series The Good Wife: throw yourself into your career

and a terrific wardrobe. Alicia’s legal career became stellar, Gemma’s medical career has been sidelined by rage. She was once a good wife, she’s an extremely bad ex-wife. These days evil

has become a tele vision stock-in-trade. Did you see The Fall, a story of a sexually rapacious psychopath made all too watchable by the mesmerising presence of Gillian Anderson as the weird,

sexy police chief DSI Stella Gibson? Psychopath rapists are not generally attractive, personable types in TV drama but Jamie Dornan as Paul Spector (later to star as Christian Grey in Fifty

Shades) certainly was. That made The Fall extra disturbing.  BBC Gemma and Simon rekindled at her home It also contained television’s sexiest-ever lesbian kiss between Gillian Anderson and

Archie Panjabi, though Panjabi pulls back from going to bed with her. “I can’t. I was brought up in Croydon,” she says. “What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Anderson. Good question. Gemma

Foster clearly wasn’t brought up in Croydon, she can do anything. It’s worth saying that Archie Panjabi brings more sexual tension to a role than anyone I can think of. Doctor Foster is not

seductive in that way, she is desperate and predatory. Since she seems capable of everything there have been moments when I thought her ferocious inner lesbian might emerge. But that may

just be me. That’s what Doctor Foster does to me. You might have thought it was good to be brought up in the beautiful small West Yorkshire town Hebden Bridge, if you’ve never watched BBC

One’s Happy Valley. Was there ever a less happy valley? You certainly wouldn’t have wanted to go to school there overseen by Frances Drummond, the beyond creepy teacher’s assistant played by

the brilliant Shirley Henderson.  BBC Gemma attempted to film her romp with Simon but was caught out Besotted with an imprisoned murderer, quietly thinking evil thoughts, she was as

disturbing as any of the noisier types we’ve seen, male, female or extra-terrestrial. Four decades ago the country was transfi xed in ecstatic outrage by the series Bouquet Of Barbed Wire

where a father was lusting after his daughter and the mother was having an affair with her sonin-law who was also having violent sex with his own wife. Television critic Clive James wrote:

“By the end everyone had been to bed with everyone else except the baby.” This sort of complex geometry probably wouldn’t shock us now. Fifty Shades is full of sexual geometry and we think

it’s mostly just silly fun. Doctor Foster is not fun. It would be shocking even if there wasn’t a son being torn apart by these warring parents, both of whom you’d be wise to avoid. But let

Gemma Foster into your sitting room and she’s unavoidable. There are only two more episodes thank goodness. Lie back and pass the defibrillator!