SnoopyStyle
Alan (David Tennant) and Tricia Hamilton (Sarah Parish) are married with two sons. He's a manager of a property company. He gets hit by a truck and suffers brain damage. He wakes up from a coma with memory loss and unstable behaviors. The family struggles to cope and Tricia has little help. He can't keep his job and they are broke.David Tennant does a good performance of a brain-damaged man. Sarah Parish has a nice turn when she breaks down. The story doesn't really have much drama. It's one incident after another. It doesn't build as much as it's a drip, drip, drip of Alan's outbursts. It doesn't make for a great dramatic movie but it's compelling for people dealing with similar situations.
David Martin
Recovery is a well-judged and balanced drama of a sensitive subject that doesn't sentimentalise the main characters. David Tennant and Sarah Parish bring to the fore the complex and conflicting emotions of a couple deeply in love struggling to come to terms with the personality changes they both endure and also must make to survive a tragic accident.Tennant, as Alan, brings humour as well as a dangerous lecherousness, as an engineer recovering from a memory loss brought on by a road accident. Alan is not portrayed simply as a victim but as human being with feelings doing the best he can to make sense of his new life. Sarah Parish's Tricia is not a clichéd stand-by-her-man housewife who will do anything to support her husband. She struggles with falling out of love with Alan, as the man she once new and loved is now a completely different person - a stranger to her.Contrary to some opinion, this - in my view - makes perfect Sunday night viewing. Too often, we are shown soft family dramas or detective series, like Heartbeat, which rot and putrefy the brain. Programme commissioners seem to think that the traditional day of rest is also a day when our minds go to sleep. More challenging and thought-provoking drama like Recovery would seriously change the situation.
M. Kent
Recovery is an incredibly moving piece of work, handling the devastating effects of brain injury on not only the individual, but the entire family. Without resorting to preaching or Hollywood sappy endings, Tony Marchant's drama presents a family in crisis in a realistic way.Highest praise goes David Tennant and Sarah Parish for their incredible performances. I had presumed before watching the drama that I would see some of their previous on screen relationship in Blackpool bleed through-- but it never does. Neither actor is recognizable from any previous work, and I didn't see either of them as an actor playing a part during the entire 90 minutes. In addition, Harry Treadaway's performance as the son just on the cusp of starting his own life in university was fantastic - throughout the piece, he shows the torn nature of a teenage boy thrown into the unwilling role as man of the house,At times, nearly every character in the drama is unsympathetic. As the viewer, I wanted to give each of them a good smack to wake up to reality, stop moping, and start adjusting to the rotten but very present change in their lives. But under the same circumstances, I see myself acting like any of them - switching between trying to show the stiff upper lip to desperation to escape to anything, including behavior that is completely unlike myself. It's the show's greatest strength - truth, without sugar coating, to force us all to think what we'd be able to do under the same circumstances.This is a difficult, but must-watch show. I hope that it somehow manages to be shown in the U.S.
nuttyneoparis
When I saw this on TV I was nervous...whats if they messed it up? Millions of families like mine that live with a brain damaged man, in my case my Dad, would be let down. I watched it with my Mum and we both ended up crying, it was so accurate and captured how the family feels as well as the person having suffered the brain injury. The actors were all wonderful and I had no complaints, my Mums told me she hasn't been able to stop thinking about it. I hope this program made many people aware of what it's like living with brain damage and what it's like for the families. More programs like this should be made, I was surprised at how good it was and it's really shook me up emotionally.