A Young Doctor's Notebook

Jon Hamm interview

Jon Hamm has put away the sharp suits to play a Russian medic in A Young Doctor's Notebook with Daniel Radcliffe. Here he talks about moving on from Mad Men and his alter ego Don, whose inner life draws so much on Hamm's own past...

A twisted tale worth telling

A review from America. "It's most gratifying to come across this odd little gem in fall TV season where most new offerings are pallid at best."

The young doctor's morphine addiction has a deadly grip: hollow-eyed, working at that terrible clinic in the middle of nowhere, he is abject. Meanwhile, his older self (Jon Hamm) too is unhappy: when the pair "meet", they fight. Though there is a scene that will delight Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe fans when they share a bath.

It's the final episode, so there's a sense of an ending for both. The young doctor is called out in a blizzard to a woman with a serious head injury. His "treatment" is shocking, but he's detached - it's the morphine. When he tries to resist, his world spins.

This comedy drama has delivered record-breaking ratings for Sky Arts, hopefully as a result of its excellence as an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's short stories as well as the celebrity of Daniel Radcliffe and Jon Hamm, both also superb. In tonight's final episode, the Doctor's morphine addiction, an inevitable response to a snowbound life in which every knock at the door brings a fresh hell, becomes overwhelming. The series' triumphant tragi-hilarious balance is particularly well struck in the incident of the husband with the dazzling trousers.

The older doctor (Jon Hamm) is in the sweaty grip of his morphine addiction as these slight tales at last take on some substance. Back in that frosty clinic decades earlier we see the start of his reliance on the drug, as the young doctor (Daniel Radcliffe) is driven to distraction by a toxic mixture of claustrophobia, boredom and fear. Only an armful of morphine can set him free.

A young girl is brought in, dying from diphtheria; her mother is hysterical while her aged babushka is in such a frenzy that only a shot of formaldehyde will shut her up.

It's Russia, 1917. Revolution is in the air. But not for Daniel Radcliffe's young Doctor, who divides his time between the horror of the operating room and the mind-bending tedium of staring at endless snow. The heightened, eventually hilarious gloom of Mikhail Bulgakov's writing has been successfully brought to life in this series. It's also surprisingly gory and, as the final episode approaches, a careful balance will have to be struck between bleak humour and genuine tragedy. Tonight, excitement is high at the prospect of the delivery of some pickled sprats. So when a knock at the door simply delivers yet another dying peasant, it's no wonder that the contents of the medicine cabinet become impossible to resist. A good idea, nicely done.

The older doctor (Jon Hamm) is looking sweaty and wan in his 1934 Moscow practice under the withering gaze of a Soviet soldier. As they both stare meaningfully at his diaries, we are wafted back to 1917 and that spartan clinic in the back of beyond.

On the page this is one of author Mikhail Bulgakov's most poignant stories, as the young doctor (Daniel Radcliffe), who has grown a feeble beard in the hope that it will make him seem more mature, faces a terrible predicament when a distraught father brings in his gravely injured young daughter.

Prepare for buckets of stomach-churning gore (be warned, it's unsparing) and low farce.

Adapted from Mikhail Bulgakov's series of short stories, Sky Arts 1's four-parter was always going to be darkly comic. But it's not until Daniel Radcliffe, playing a callow backwoods doctor at the dawn of the Russian revolution, amputates an eight-year-old girl's leg that the humour in this second episode really kicks into high gear (if you'll forgive the pun). Fine, Sky's PR team can call this a 'comedy drama' if it likes. But this is gross-out slapstick of the highest order - having more in common with The Evil Dead than any brooding, costumed piece of period schmaltz. Meanwhile, the noose continues to tighten round Jon Hamm, who plays the older version of Radcliffe (the show is essentially a series of flashbacks, in which the older doctor counsels his younger self). Will his state inquisitor discover he's addicted morphine? Almost certainly, but it's difficult to care when the set pieces are this brilliant. Comedy, 1. Drama, 0.