Recovery Reviews

TV Picks: Recovery | Liverpool Echo Feb 26 2007

David Tennant is such a fine actor that if he chose to read the phone book on prime time telly I'd probably tune in to watch.
Fortunately the current Doctor Who was served with an idea and a script so good - and co stars to match - that his role of Alan Hamilton is perhaps the best thing he's ever done.
Behind a beard and his natural Scottish accent he played a building site manager whose unspectacular but happy existence is torn apart when e is involved in a road accident.
This one off drama followed his attempts to rebuild his life and identity though a fog of amnesia as a result of a brain injury.
In turns comic and tragic, his behaviour veers between anger and frustration at being unable to perform simple tasks such as getting dressed to vulnerable and child like as he slowly realises that the man he was may never come back.
"I used to have a full time job," he says at one point, "Now I've become one".
This could have been bleak viewing but Tennant has a comic touch which managed to find the humour in the absurdity and sadness of a situation faced by more than 100,000 people every year.
It was a tour de force performance, too, for Sarah Parish as wife Tricia struggling to come to terms with the fact that the man she loved may be gone forever.
The power of the piece lay as much in her journey in her learning to live with a near stranger as it did with Tennant's remarkable skill inhabiting a role none of us would wish to experience in real life.

The Most Harrowing TV Drama Ever | The Herald Feb 26 2007

First things first: if you watched Recovery, I'm sure you'll be feeling inspired to make a donation to Headway, the charity that tries to help all those affected by brain injury, and which was also the organisation that assisted Recovery's author, Tony Marchant, in his factual research for the drama.
You can make your donation easily and near-instantly on-line at www.headway.org.uk

If you didn't watch Recovery, you can still donate to Headway. You just won't know that the play was one of TV's saddest, most harrowing dramas ever - and one that should, if there's any justice, produce bucketloads of awards for its two stars: wur ain former Doctor Who, David Tennant, and Sarah Parish.
Jolly entertainment, Recovery wasn't; heart-breakingly educative, it was.

With deft thespian rigour, David T and Sarah P portrayed your average happily-married couple, Alan and Tricia, whose affectionate routine was destroyed when Alan suffered a brain injury in a car accident.

In an instant, Alan became a ghastly stranger to those who loved him most. Brain injury, you see, plays the cruel trick of leaving folk looking like their former selves, while transforming them into spookily childlike amnesiacs incapable of putting their clothes on or making a piece of toast without burning the kitchen down, and who are at the same time terribly prone to uttering sexually uninhibited comments to casual passers-by. "What was going through your mind?" Tricia asked Alan with horror after another casual occurrence of such an outrage. "Everything that came out of my mouth," Alan replied matter-of-factly.

Shortly after that, Alan sought, with a kind of unknowing adolescent directness, to re-establish sexual relations with his wife. Poor Tricia ended up in tears.

Most of Recovery's audience must have been weeping, too, at this point. Brain injury: it's most brutal and dehumanising for those who have to try to deal with it at close-hand, in the home, 24/7.

Alan's condition also made him embarrass and frighten his two sons by, among other things, making him give vent to senseless outbursts of rage, inappropriate giggling and unseemly public nakedness. Additionally, Alan's helpless state compelled Tricia, his wife, to give up being his wife and become a ragged-at-the-edges, despairing version of his mum. In this tragic, unending and near-superhuman day-to-day task, Tricia was given precious little practical help by the health care industry. When Alan was discharged from hospital, all Tricia received was a consultant's bland assurance that if she loved her husband then, by golly, she'd be unable to stop herself making him better.

However, as the blameless Tricia later pointed out to the same consultant shortly before fleeing from her husband: "You saved his life, but it's not worth living. You take them home, and all you see is the death of everything. He can't get better because he doesn't know there's anything wrong with him."

Given the factual input that Tony Marchant received from Headway, Recovery seemed to imply that this hands-off medical non-intervention is all too common a mode of treatment. Likewise, Alan's one visit to a day-care and rehabilitation unit confronted us with a vision of nineteenth-century mental health provision, ie Bedlam.

So show a bit of compassion in the easiest way possible, please. Your cash to Headway can make a difference.

Last Night's TV Recovery | The Telegraph Feb 26 2007

At the start of Recovery (BBC 1), Alan and Tricia Hamilton were dancing and laughing together in their kitchen. Last night’s drama, though, didn’t stay so carefree for long. Soon afterwards, Alan (David Tennant) was run over while hailing a cab. By the time he came out of his coma, the doctors had diagnosed a brain injury. What they didn’t know – mainly because it’s unknowable – is how this would affect his personality. Tricia (Sarah Parish) was warned that he’d probably be different, but at this stage seemed optimistic that, given enough love from her, all would be well. “My husband,” she declared grandly, “is more than a neural pathway.” The rest of the programme concerned her growing realisation that she might be wrong on both counts.

Alan’s individual symptoms could certainly be alarming: a tendency to grope women’s bottoms, to scream at the children, and to set fire to the kitchen when making toast. Yet, the real agony for Tricia wasn’t that her Alan was doing strange things – but that he wasn’t her Alan any more. Instead, she was pouring out all this care and support on a stranger. Except, needless to say, that the situation was even worse than that. Not only did this stranger look like Alan, but he had occasional flashes of lucidity which confirmed that the man she’d loved since she was 16 was still in there somewhere. Tricia also sensed the black irony that loneliness and distress were in danger of changing her personality too.

As you’d expect, the two lead actors did full justice to Tony Marchant’s powerful but carefully observed script. David Tennant performed the more extravagantly bonkers stuff with great aplomb. He was better still at those terrible quieter moments when Alan suddenly recognised what he’d become. In capturing Tricia’s constant alternation between determination and despair, Sarah Parish made both elements equally understandable.

Of course, perhaps the biggest problem with a drama like this is how to end it, and Marchant didn’t quite solve that. On the one hand, he clearly wanted to show that brain injury is not something that’s liable to reach a happy ending – or in fact an ending of any kind. On the other, a drama (especially on BBC 1) does need some sort of resolution.

In the event, he seemed to try out a few possible outcomes, before plumping for a scene of the couple dancing again. “What if I can’t make you happy?” said Alan. “What if I can’t come back?” “Well, I’ll just take what you’ve got,” Tricia replied. After all we’d seen, this calm acceptance of her lot felt a bit too easy – although, in Marchant’s defence, I can’t imagine many viewers wanting it any other way.

Doctor Who To Doctor Who Am I? | The Times Feb 26 2007

When David Tennant became the tenth Doctor Who, he continued a tradition of changing the look and personality of our favourite Time Lord. In Recovery (Sunday, BBC One), he was playing another changed man. As a construction manager who had been hit by a lorry, he came out of a coma to find a clipboard facing him that outlined his predicament: “Your name is Alan Hamilton. You are in hospital. You have been involved in a road accident. Your brain is injured. You will have problems making sense of things.”

That was the plot of Tony Marchant’s drama, which occasionally had a clipboard-checklist quality as Alan experienced short-term memory loss, word-finding difficulties and a lack of inhibitions.

This led to childish helplessness, angry outbursts, masturbating in front of nurses and suggesting to strangers that they all take off their clothes and watch Countdown . It was the kind of show-every-emotion part that actors kill for, but Tennant didn’t turn it into a “Give me a Bafta!” turn. This was no star vehicle, since the story was as much about the emotional journey of Alan’s wife, Tricia.

She was gradually worn down to acute despair by the slow, uncertain and infuriating road to recovery of someone who was no longer, and would never fully be, the man she had loved since she was 16. A clearer sense of what Alan had been like before the accident would have helped to amplify Tricia’s frustration. But Sarah Parish made up for it with a superb portrayal of shifting feelings, whether portraying Tricia’s initially flinty determination to see things through or the shell-shocked regret of a one-night-stand.

Marchant likes to give us subjects to chew over, whether it’s debt ( Never Never ), prescription drugs and hyperactivity ( Kid in the Corner ) or fertility treatment ( The Family Man ). But give him more than one episode and his dialogue often turns diagrammatic and his characters can end up buried in a pile of issues, so that the drama takes on the schematic quality of those worthy US TV movies that pepper the daytime schedules.

Being a one-off drama, Recovery had less room to indulge these tendencies, although the occasional implausibility (would Alan be allowed back near a building site so soon?) and research-laden scene were still apparent.

Yet Tennant and Parish made it affecting viewing and Marchant scored in charting Tricia’s eventual realisation that she had to learn to accept Alan as a different person. This also thankfully avoided the Hollywood trend to use memory loss as a gateway to deeper healing, a little miracle to help us forget our mean adult selves and learn to be innocent again. Marchant’s drama ended on an optimistic note, but it was by no means the end of Alan and Tricia’s journey. Recovery hadn’t turned into Recovered .

Recovery | The Guardian Feb 26 2007

There was nothing remotely funny about Recovery (Sunday, BBC1), Tony Marchant's moving drama about a family dealing with the aftermath of a horrible accident.

It seems to be something a serious actor has to do - play someone with up-there problems. Hoffman's done it, DiCaprio . . . as have lots of other major movie stars I can't quite think of right now. Here, on a smaller scale, our own David Tennant (taking a break from the Tardis) is playing Alan, who's been left with severe brain damage after being run over. He's extremely good at it, totally convincing as the husk of his former self. And Sarah Parish is also brilliant as his broken wife.

It wasn't over-sentimental, just believable. And much more powerful for that. Anyone who says they didn't have a lump in their throats is either an unfeeling brute or a liar.

Doctor Who? | The Scotsman Feb 24 2007

The last time David Tennant and Sarah Parish appeared together on screen was in the 2006 Doctor Who Christmas special. Tennant, of course, was in the guise of the nation's favourite time traveller, whereas Parish was completely unrecognisable as a gigantic crimson spider queen.

They are reunited in the one-off BBC drama Recovery, which couldn't be more different from their last outing. You get to see Doctor Who's scrawny bum for one thing. Tennant is an actor who has never been shy of showing off his birthday suit, although I fear that if a child accidentally stumbles upon the scene of him absent- mindedly toying with his privates, they may be scarred for life. I remember being profoundly distressed by the sight of a baying Tom Baker kneading Julie T Wallace's breasts in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, a spectacle which somewhat undermined his previous role as noble protector of the universe.

Tennant plays a happily married family man who is run over by a lorry in a scene of shocking, sudden brutality. After languishing in a coma, during which his wife (Parish) unwisely plays Paul Weller's You Do Something to Me in an effort to revive him - enough to finish anyone off, surely? - he eventually recovers, albeit as a befuddled shadow of his former self. His long- term memory has evaporated, leaving him as a vacant, childlike shell of a man prone to sudden bursts of rage and embarrassingly inappropriate sexual behaviour. "Let's take off all our clothes and watch Countdown," he yells to a stranger.

He no longer loves his wife, since he no longer has any idea who she is and his teenage son is understandably appalled by his father's shameful behaviour.

Tennant is brilliant in the role, especially in the scenes in which he explodes into impotent, anguished fury. Initial reservations that he looks too boyish to convince as a father of two growing boys (despite having grown a beard to weather his saucer-eyed features) are vanquished as his powerful performance unfolds. Parish also puts in a strong turn as a woman struggling to cope with having a soulmate turn into a stranger. This is sobering, saddening stuff, a tragic portrait of a living hell which, if nothing else, should encourage you to be more vigilant the next time you cross the road.