New Stephen Graham and Jodie Comer drama shines light on ‘undervalued’ care workers during pandemic

A new Channel 4 drama airing tonight will be shining a light on the undervalued carers who worked valiantly throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

Help, written by Jack Thorne, will be telling the tale of Sarah, played by Jodie Comer, a newly appointed carer who strives to protect her patients in a fictional Liverpool care home throughout the 2020 lockdowns. This is England star Stephen Graham plays one of the care home’s residents who is suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s.

An official synopsis reads: “A determined Sarah goes to extraordinary lengths to protect those in her care, whose conditions make their suffering and isolation all the more traumatic. But the staff’s unwavering commitment, compassion and heroic efforts can only do so much, and Sarah is pushed into a dark corner and desperately looks for a way out.”

Channel 4

A large part of the film will focus on a daunting night shift in which Sarah is left to run the care home alone and tend to patients struggling with the side effects of Covid, something that many care workers across the country will have had to endure.

Speaking of the particular scene at the show’s BFI launch, Comer said: “I think that big sequence was probably the most difficult for us all.

And Marc [Munden, the director] really pushed me on that, I remember there was a moment, we’d done this whole take and I was so in my own head and I was like, ‘I think we’ve got it,’ and Marc was like, ‘No, we’re going to do one more,’ and I was like, ‘Uhh, okay.’

“And we did it again, and the moments we got in that second take we never would have got in the first. And I think Marc was phenomenal at that, knowing when to push you that little bit more. That was probably the most difficult for all of us, because we had to huddle together and act as a team.”

Graham also noted that his role helped him to see carers in a different light, with him saying: “It takes a special kind of human being to be a carer. I’ve had children, had to change my children, wash and bathe them, that’s one thing. But to do that for an older person, someone who’s coming maybe towards the end of their life, you’re trying to make their days as comfortable as can be.

“For someone to do that day in, day out, and not just the practical but the humane aspect… You’re their source of the outside world, their communication. And this is what’s so beautiful about our story, we see [Sarah] come alive. Maybe she wasn’t the most gifted academically, maybe she wasn’t going to change the world with her brain, but she’s changing somebody’s life.”

Help airs tonight on Channel 4 at 9pm.