Footballers' Wives ITV
The Trust C4
ER E4
Scrubs Sky One
Episode two of Footballers' Wives saw poor Chardonnay Lane suffering every girl's worst hen nightmare when her breasts caught fire just days before her wedding. It was that smarmy low-life in the restaurant with the candelabra wotdunit, though it could just as easily have been the result of some hot bedtime friction-action with premier league fiancé Kyle.
This kind of tragic accident would be enough to put the average bride off intimate and protracted contact with a wedding frock, not to mention a husband-to-be. But given that Chardonnay earns her living revealing her bosom, she could be forgiven for burning her pink satin, marabou and tulle meringue (trust me on this) and checking straight into the Priory - or at the least embarking on a meaningless fling with Ally McCoist.
As tragically charred Chardonnay lay at home in bed, doped up to the eyeballs and with her boobs deflating inside a bandeau-style bandage, we learnt that she could expect to be scarred for life - a massive blow for a topless model who had just landed a seven-figure contract (I can't imagine quite what sort of contract this might be, but perhaps the seven figures begin with 0898). I was also quite surprised that such famous flaming breasts were not worthy of instant hospitalisation. Indeed, Chardonnay was up and about at home the following day (under the weather, if not underwired) and as the credits rolled, the wedding of the year was back on. I wince to think of the sort of surgical smalls she'll need to get herself up the aisle. Meanwhile, Earls Park's chairman, Frank, is in a coma in the Ikea Memorial Ward of the local hospital, the kind of place where pursed-lipped nurses still wear candy-striped uniforms and impersonate Hattie Jacques.
'What do you think, Nurse? Any chance he'll pull through?' wondered wicked Tanya Turner, the malicious minxlet who'd put Frank there in the first place. 'What I always say to nearest and dearest,' said the earnest nurse, 'is where there's life and good bedside nursing there's still hope.' Huh. Chance would be a fine thing. Unfortunately, I've spent an inordinate amount of 2002 shuttling around various top London teaching hospitals mopping the brows of my nearest and dearest (this is the excuse for temporarily, if unforgiveably, locating South Georgia in the Falklands, Shackleton fans) which has revealed that when it comes to 'good bedside nursing', like Louis Vuitton handbags, there's a very long waiting list.
Recently, as I attempted to locate a parent who had just been sent by ambulance into my local A&E, the first thing I saw was a documentary camera crew filming another admission. Disconcertingly, just beyond the director and the cameraman and the sound guy's boom, I spotted my wan relative languishing unattended nearby - a sight which made this real-life mini-drama feel like stumbling onto a particularly surreal Casualty set. Minutes later, I spotted the teary huddle of another family with the camera slithering opportunistically their way. A few days later, just after my partner had contracted pneumonia in order to extend an enjoyable stay inside the tropical diseases isolation ward of another London hospital, I arrived in reception to be told that the unit was going to star on that night's BBC 10 o'clock news. When I tuned in later, the reception appeared to be staffed entirely by doctors and senior house officers - an enviably high level of care, but not one I'd witnessed at any other time. Apparently doctors are as big a bunch of telly tarts as vets.
Needless to say, last week the novelty of spending time in a selection of NHS hospitals was wearing thin, but despite the danger of contracting Munchausen's Syndrome I thought I'd better catch Channel 4's The Trust.
By the end of this remarkable film I had decided that if the presence of an intrusive camera crew is the only way we can share in the day-to-day trials of medical staff forced to play musical beds with gravely ill patients in intensive care units (though these days they're Intensive Therapy Units), then so be it. Better still, let's hold a big raffle and raise enough money so that every hospital can have its own crew!
The first of five programmes focusing on Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre made for very moving and, occasionally, desperately frustrating TV. At the centre of all the whirling human dramas (Jon's coma, brave Pauline's failed neurosurgery, the assorted strokes and motorbike smashes) were the staff. Their unnervingly super-calm demeanour (or perhaps just exhaustion) failed to mask the chaos of working in an area of the heath service which, even with £150 million from the Government (in order to create 220 extra Intensive Therapy beds across the country), still suffers from a desperate shortfall of nurses. Cruel irony: if the newly available beds are actually filled, ITU staff are stretched beyond their capacity.
'It's the most soul-destroying aspect of the whole thing,' said the beleaguered consultant in charge of one night's bed-juggling, resulting in the decision to move 81-year-old Joe to another hospital 30 miles away. It was a back-handed compliment because although Joe did not look very strong (he couldn't, in fact, speak) he was still the fittest of the ITU bunch.
'The Government has made significant efforts, but if you were to view the NHS as a patient in intensive care then it would still be critically ill,' the consultant later observed - a neat, if not very original soundbite which had already over-stretched itself by being used in the series' pacy ER -ish trailers. In fact, there were other less-flashy quotes that resonated more strongly:
'If it happens I will be devastated,' said Pauline Calshaw's husband, on the verge of tears as he contemplated the prospect of his wife failing to emerge from her unexpected post-operative coma. 'In medical terms and legal terms Mrs Calshaw has died,' observed a disembodied doctor as the camera panned over her left hand, her wedding ring, and away. We'd met Pauline just 40 minutes earlier, when she was alive and optimistic and all that stood between her and a golden wedding anniversary was that silly brain tumour. She hadn't looked like a quitter.
After this, the arrival of the eighth series of ER (on E4) was light relief, despite the traditional Hieronymous Bosch pre-credits scene. This week there was a waiting-room full of the victims of a TV talk show bust-up, the result of on-screen revelations such as: 'Your Mom Says Your Boyfriend Is Your Brother!' and 'Hey, Your Girlfriend Is Really A Guy!'.
This could easily have been played for whatever it is that passes for laughs on ER (wry and/or knowing smiles, very occasionally) but instead erred on the side of camp melodrama, notably when the girl who had just been told that the father of her unborn baby was her brother decided to commit suicide by jumping out of a window, thus nearly flattening Goran Visnjic (which would have been a tragedy).
In the event, as her mom tearily admitted, the girl's boyfriend wasn't her brother at all. Lured by the prospect of a couple of nights in the Chicago Hilton, some shopping and a fleeting moment of daytime telly notoriety, mom had made the whole thing up. Next week: Dr Benton gets to grip with a waiting room's worth of burned boobs when the Miss Chicago beauty pageant is attacked by a post-feminist terrorist wielding a flamethrower (well, it's one up on those Seventies flour bombs).
Sky One's frenetic new medical comedy import, Scrubs, was just as fast and furious as ER but much funnier. Kind of a funkier Doogie Howser MD via Malcolm in the Middle with just a hint of a Wonder Years -style soft-centre, the first 21 minutes (that's a US half-hour) followed medical intern J.D. on the first day of his very first hospital job, during which he learnt important lessons such as 'if you push around a stiff nobody'll ask you to do anything'.
Smart, dark and so quick-witted I'm not sure I could have followed the dialogue if I hadn't watched it on video, Scrubs apparently got recommissioned in the States after just two episodes, which basically means it's a big, big hit. And it even had one unusual dramatic detail in common with last week's ER : a transsexual wearing evening dress in the waiting room - which was two more transsexuals than I had managed to spot in either St Mary's A&E or UCH's tropical diseases unit.
Still, I guess we should not make unreasonable demands of the NHS - just be grateful that where there's life and good bedside nursing, there's still hope for hospital drama: 'Nurse! The small screens!'
