Last night I watched BBC soap Holby City and realised that Auntie is missing a huge trick…
I’m not a soap addict but this has nothing to do with snooty cultural pretensions (I avoid opera like the plague too) –- it’s just that most soaps depress the living hell out of me. Maybe it’s something to do with seeing the same set of characters grinding through the same conflicts in the same grinding environment.
But last night, thanks to a finger-brain malfunction involving my baffling TV remote, I accidentally selected Holby City and, before I could rectify my unfortunate slip, caught a few seconds of it. That’s all it took, because we (my better half got caught too), kept watching to the end credits. Why? Because it was a riot.
The format was the usual intercut triple storyline with some light character-arcing around the edges to keep the few people who care about that stuff (ie: the Holby script editors) happy.
Story ‘A’ featured two female surgeons who were trying to out-bitch each other while not really tending to a toddler who had fired some nails into his heart using his handyman father’s nail gun — I blame all that sodding decking.
Story ‘B’ featured a senior male surgeon lumbered with looking after his baby son (or was it his grandson?) and not really on scalpel duty but nevertheless pressured into conducting a risky op on a woman who wanted him to ‘let her go’ if things got messy while her sullen daughter (prone to regular stormings off) wanted her mother to be kept going no matter what.
Story ‘C’ involved a senior nurse and a newly appointed junior doctor who tried to out-bitch each other while not really tending to a group of old hags who had poisoned themselves by drinking out of dodgy lead-lined cups –- I blame the Antiques Roadshow.
The script was cliché-ridden awfulness, the acting would have been embarrassingly over-the-top in a seaside panto, the direction was sub-Teletubby. All in all it was a joy.
There were so many high spots it seems unfair to pick out any in particular, but the moment when the two female surgeons paused for what seemed like minutes to glower and slag each other off in the middle of a delicate keyhole procedure to remove three-inch nails from the aforementioned tot’s ventricle, was side-splitting.
So too was the scene in the ladies loo when the newly appointed junior doctor (who was topping up her mascara) told the senior nurse that she was quite pretty really and all she needed was some expert help with her blusher.
Oh – and when the slightly more bitchy of the two bitchy surgeons told a junior that he couldn’t perform operations until he’d spent a day learning to do that trick where you roll a coin across the top of your knuckles.
Marvellous. This is what makes our huge licence fee bearable. There’s just one suggestion I’d make to the BBC Drama team, be generous and hand this property over to Comedy –- they haven’t got anything remotely funny at present and Holby could be their salvation.