TRUST ME, BBC1, 9pm
ANGRY men who raged at Jodie Whittaker’s appointment as Doctor Who will chuckle at this new drama where she plays a woman pretending to be a doctor.
It calls to mind the conspiracy theories which abounded when Peter Capaldi, prior to taking up the sci-fi role, played a World Health Organisation medic in World War Z and was credited as “WHO Doctor”.
Whittaker plays a nurse who blows the whistle on NHS negligence so the bosses turn on her. In her rage and despair she decides she can be a better doctor and so she fakes some references, heads to Edinburgh and gets a job as an A&E doc.
You have to accept that you can change your name, then open a bank account, get a flat with the fake documents and take on someone else’s GMC registration. If you can suspend disbelief at these niggles then you’ll enjoy the shivery tension as she nervously plunges a scalpel into a patient’s side in her first attempt at surgery.
UTOPIA: IN SEARCH OF THE DREAM, BBC4, 9pm
THERE’S no need to look to great artists and philosophers for an explanation of utopia: just go to the football and ask John Motson.
The veteran commentator explains that going to the game on a Saturday was a form of utopia, especially in the post-war era when workers had few rights or holiday time, so 90 minutes at the football allowed them to forget it all and share a common passion.
So the idea of utopia is everywhere, “from Swift to Star Trek, Wagner to Wikipedia”, and historian Richard Clay asks what it means and what forms it can take.
He explains the most famous vision of utopia, that of Thomas More, was inspired by natives of South America who were seen as “innocent and uncorrupted by the European love of gold”. But that “love of gold” led to endeavour, adventure and scientific advance, so wouldn’t a “utopia” of peace and ease make us all a bit lazy?
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