Radio Times - Tennant's 'Recovery'

In Hollywood terms, a knock on the head is no big deal: there’s just a tense moment of eyelid flickering before the sleeper awakes from their coma, shakes out their hair and falls into the arms of their loved ones. The reality of serious brain injury is brutally different. What happens if, on waking, the brain-injured person no longer knows his loved ones; no longer - for that matter - knows how, orwhat it is, to love?

This is the terrifying situation explored in the BBC drama Recovery by award-winning screenwriter Tony Marchant (Crime and Punishment, The Family Man). Starring David Tennant as Alan, a husband and father whose personality is all but wiped out after a traffic accident, and Sarah Parish as Tricia, the wife who must find new ways of loving the stranger in her sitting room, the film is an unsparing portrait of a family in crisis.

“I was approached to write a play about memory loss,” says Marchant. “It was only when I started researching the effects of brain injury that I realised how completely our identity is bound up with memory, how much of human relationships are based on the knowledge of shared history. And how difficult it is for a brain-injured person when that personal history disappears and you’re trying to claw your way back to find out who you are.”

Marchant worked closely with the brain injury charity Headway, and his tightly researched scenario pulls no punches: Tennant’s frustration sparks like static from the screen. Parish is no less impressive as the wife who meets the demands of caring for her husband - a physically healthy adult who can neither make his own toast nor govern his sexual impulses - with a believable balance of heroism and human frailty. For both actors, meeting survivors of brain injury and their families was crucial to their understanding of the project: “This is an incredibly sensitive subject. It would be fantastically disrespectful to turn up on the first day of the shoot and say, ‘Right then, brain injury - let’s wing it,’ says Tennant who filmed Recovery in his summer break from Doctor Who. “I read masses of case studies and personal testimonies, but by far the most important thing was meeting the people at the Headway facility in Essex and talking to men who had experienced what Alan goes through. Then there came a point where I had to stop. I felt I was learning too much about it, and it was important for me not to know what was going on; for everything to be as brand new and bewildering to me as it is to Alan.”

“A lot of the people we met were concerned that they should be represented correctly,” adds Parish. “Because brain injury is something no-one really knows very much about. Maybe because they’re embarrassed to ask, maybe because the person involved is embarrassed to tell them. So I think to tackle these things in a drama is great.”

According to Joanna Wright of Headway, lack of public awareness is one of the hardest things surviors of severe brain injury have to face. “David Tennant’s character looks absolutely fine, but he’s got a lot of cognitive deficits resulting from his accident, and people like this often face a great lack of tolerance over some of their issues,” says Wright. The fact that every brain injury is unique, depending on which part of the brain is damaged, makes promoting the difficulties faced by sufferers even harder. Cognitive deficits can include a lack of social/sexual inhibition, extreme emotional instability and problems with communication. “Sufferers may know what they want to say but can’t get the words out, which of course cranks up the frustration even more,” says Wright. “It becomes very socially isolating because you’ve only got to yell at a friend a few times and people think, ‘Well, I can’t cope with that’. Friends back away and family members often do the same. In many cases, marriages don’t survive.”

Every single day when we were filming I had to ask myself, ‘What would I do in this woman’s situation?’” says Parish. “Would I go, or would I stay with a man who looks like my husband but doesn’t speak, or act, or even feel like him?” It’s a kind of bereavement, but a bereavement you can’t get over - you’re reminded of your loss every day because this person who isn’t your husband is there in front of you. My character, Tricia, is fallible. She gets angry, she gets things wrong. I’m glad she wasn’t written as some kind of angel at the bedside, because I think the guilt and pressure put on women by society in these matters is just heartbreaking.”

“It’s an almost impossible ask for most people,” agrees Marchant. “Does a wife have a moral responsibility to stay with a character who has become impossible to live with, but through no fault of his own? To deal with the loss of the sexual, romantic and intellectual sharing that a marriage is based on -as well as the practical implications of becoming a carer instead of a partner - you either have to be a saint or you have to learn to expect less from your life together. Because there’s no miracle cure.

“Recovery is almost an ironic title, because for sufferers of severe brain injury - and there are about 1,500 people a year, mainly young men, who go through the kind of thing Alan experiences - it’s a lifelong condition. There comes a point - not in all cases, but in most - where you just aren’t going to get hugely better and you can’t beat around the bush with that.

“It’s something all the men at Headway said to me: ‘Don’t have a bloody happy ending’. On the other hand, you’re writing drama; you have to offer some redemptive glimmer. And when a love is affirmed in these extraordinarily difficult circumstances, you’re touching something profound and extremely moving.”

Since making the film, David Tennant has become a patron of Headway. “The families we worked with were so extremely generous in laying out the reality of their lives for us. I hope we’ve done them proud. I know I’ve come away from the experience with a hugely increased sense of just how fragile we all are. I now really, really look when I’m crossing the road. For me, Recovery doesn’t play like some big issue-led campaigning piece, but it makes you think. It makes you grateful you’re able to think.”