FRESH FROM THE TELLY : "A YOUNG DOCTOR’S NOTEBOOK"

Ok, here we go. As promised, I am keeping up with the more up to date stuff (a New Year's resolution as you can imagine) - and keeping you guys up to date with it, more to the point. Now, at first glance, this series seems more like a comedy than anything else. Studded with big names like John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe and advertised, on one of the bigger TV channels here in the UK (I’ll name no names but if you have eyes and live in the UK you know which one I mean. The ads are literally EVERYWHERE). All that and the trailer, showcasing the funnier, more surreal moments made me think it was a sort of sit-com or something like that, about the naïve young doctor trying to get used to small-town life. Having lots of funny adventures. Going on to find true love, meaning and success here. *Yawn*.

But then, you see, a teeny bit of information caught my eye while perusing the net. Based on the short stories by Mikhail Bulgakov (author of The Master and Margarita among other classics). Err hang on a minute. Bulgakov’s books and stories can be categorised as many things. “Difficult to read” may well be the foremost among these categories. Material ideal to be made into flippant sit-coms, is almost certainly not one of them. Hence my decision to give them a spin. Needless to say, I was hooked from the end of the first episode onwards. Allow me to try and explain why.

Ok, so my rather snooty overview of the storyline has an element of truth in it. Yes, it is about a young doctor, Vladimir Bomgard (Daniel Radcliffe), a rather brilliant young doctor at that, whose first assignment it is to run a small rural hospital in the middle of nowhere in Russia, 1917. The first clue that it will not have the “fluffy” ending I outlined for it though comes in something very basic: this is a mini-series, only four episodes long. And each episode is about 25 minutes long. So, this has to be a hard-hitting story that puts across a lot of “stuff” in a short amount of time. And it does. You see, it becomes very clear very quickly that the story is told by way of remiscence, as it were. The older Dr. Bomgard (Jon Hamm) comes across his old diary and thinks back on his early days as a doctor. But such deep plunges into the past often are, as you can guess, a way of escaping from the present. So what, pray tell, is our Dr. Bomgard trying to escape from? And would he do better to stay in the present and face it?

If you’re in any way familiar with Bulgakov, you will be able to guess that, funny as the story may seem in the beginning, there is, from the word go, a deep, dark and “unpleasant” undercurrent. I especially love the way this side of the story shows itself – but only very briefly – in the first episode and get progressively more prominent, until it dominates completely in the fourth and last episode. The progression of Bomgard’s state of mind is very, very well given. On the other hand, there are of course, many little elements of comedy, offset by some rather brilliant acting, based around the young and inexperienced Dr. Bomgard (whose name, I realise in retrospect, we never actually hear in the series!). And the quality of the cast – not just the star names, but the entire cast – allayed any doubts I had about the film being a little too “sit-com”y. On the contrary, the young Vladimir Bomgard is a chain-smoking, ill-shaven bag of nerves who yearns for his life back in Moscow. Not any kind of cliché you could imagine, but a very real man. A contributing factor to this feeling may well be that the stories are semi-autobiographical – Bulgakov actually trained as a doctor.

In short this one is something familiar, good quality and interesting but with just that hint of the extraordinary to make you sit up and pay attention. I was seriously impressed. And I’m pretty sure you will be too.