Review
Doctor Foster
BBC One
Alison Rowat
****
SHE didn’t quite go full Jack Nicholson, stick her head through an axed door and bellow “Here’s Doctor Foster!” but there was no mistaking it: the bitch is back.
Lest anyone take offence at the B-bomb, it is a tag that the titular GP infamously claimed for herself at the end of the first run of the BBC hit drama in 2015. A woman scorned by an unfaithful husband, Gemma Foster (Suranne Jones) took her revenge at a tell-all dinner party that made your average Game of Thrones blood-soaked wedding look like a toddler’s birthday tea. Here was a TV heroine who was mad as hell at her lot and did not care who knew it.
But what is this? Two years after 10 million viewers (a tally second only to Call the Midwife) watched Doctor Foster reduce her hubby to a puddle of shame, slimy Simon (Bertie Carvel) rocked up from exile in London with a new wife, a new baby, and a big new house with a swimming pool. Worse, he had grown a new spine. Old beardy snake hips was demanding his life of suburban respectability back, whether Gemma liked it or not. Gemma, played by Jones as a cross between Joan Crawford and Gloria Gaynor, did not like it one little bit.
True to form, the series opener was crammed with twists that ought to have made the whole affair laughably hammy. But somehow the combination of yummy mummies and daddies behaving badly, style supplement settings, and hints of post-watershed naughtiness to come, makes one forgive writer Mike Bartlett his lurches into excess.
Indeed, before the new man in Gemma’s life had barely finished saying, “You should just let them get on with it”, the doc was toe to toe again with the new Mr and Mrs Foster. Nostrils flared, threats were hurled like wedding china, and the poor lad in the middle of it all, Simon and Gemma’s teenage son Tom, had fixed one eye on the knife drawer and the other on the number for child services.
By episode’s end the battle lines between the doc and Simon were well and truly drawn in blood and lipstick. Will no-one think of the children? Or the new Mrs Foster’s hope that everything will be peaceful from now on? Heck, no. Where would be the fun and the five-part series in that? It can only get sillier, and steamier, from here.
The bitch is back. Long live the bitch.