Television
Heart-
James Delingpole
Though I really didn't mean to waste yet another review discussing the relative merits of American and British television, I'm afraid I can't help myself. I'm just so sick of being told that ER (Wednesday, Channel 4) is better than any of our home- grown offerings that I want to set the record straight. Cardiac Arrest (Tuesday, BBC 1) is, by a long chalk, the finest hospi- tal drama on television.
It's not that I'm incapable of appreciat- ing ER's many virtues: it's slick, well-acted, witty, gory and full of that authentic medi- co-speak (`ultrascan his weebles, sprog in five mills of polydihydrochloride and oscil- late the XTCs down to REM' — or what- ever. I couldn't actually be bothered to rewind the video and transcribe the real dialogue) with which lay viewers so love to be baffled. But it isn't cynical enough. The doctors on ER really care. They lis- ten attentively when each incoming patient insists on rewriting their life story. They weep buckets when a child is born. They agonise incessantly over ethical niceties. I'm astonished they manage to find any time left for the humdrum business of treating their patients.
I don't mean to suggest that real life doc- tors are brusque and heartless, except maybe the college quack at Oxford who refused to refer me to St Pancras Tropical Diseases Hospital, thus consigning me to seven years of untreated bilharzia. And I've no doubt that the doctors in general hospi- tals are altruistic and hideously overworked and underpaid. But I simply don't believe that when you're toiling flat out in an emergency ward you can afford to get too emotionally involved with your patients.
ER, created by Michael 'Jurassic Park' Crichton, is set in one of those scary Amer- ican hospitals where you end up if you have no medical insurance. Typical patients might include gangland shooting victims, addicts and prostitutes with hepatitis. The idea is to process them as quickly as possi- ble lest they waste too many tax dollars not hang around trying to untangle their emotional lives.
To be fair, ER does make the odd ges- ture towards verisimilitude. We do get to meet some of the above unfortunates, albeit in slightly sanitised form: both this week's sick-splattered hobo and his HIV- positive girlfriend could almost have been extras from Baywatch. We also get a glimpse of harsh utilitarianism, as embod- ied by nasty, penny-pinching Dr Vucelich. On the whole though, both casualties and medical staff are implausibly cute. Would, for example, a doctor really go so far as to take time off for the funeral of an old woman he had treated insensitively?
Another thing that bothers me about ER — though the charge could equally be applied to most US serial drama — is that beneath its chaotic veneer, it is so rigorous- ly formulaic and calculated. Each episode invariably contains at least two resolved subplots and a couple of ongoing story- lines: e.g., will plucky young surgeon Dr Benton succeed in proving that his superi- or, Dr Vucelich, is guilty of malpractice?
Actually, I can confidently predict the answer, not because I have seen future episodes but because Dr Benton is black, whereas his rival, despite belonging to the minority of bearded people whose name ends in `ich', is white. Positive stereotyping tends to make a mockery of narrative sus- pense. It also leads to intensely irritating scenes, like the one in which the hospital's biggest expert in motorcycle maintenance just happens to be, yes, a woman.
John MacUre, ex-doctor author of Car- diac Arrest, has few such scruples. It's not that he shirks any of the issues — race, homosexuality, NHS funding, sexual har- rassment, ethical crises — but that he han- dles them so deftly and wittily that you never really feel they have been dumped on the drama to lend it spurious gravitas.
I'm sure that an American writer would never have dared create a female lead quite so highly sexed and cynical as the scrumptious Dr Maitland (Helen Baxen- dale), nor a principal 'ethnic' character so feckless and irresponsible as Dr Rajah (the excellent Ahsen Bhatti). But then, almost everyone is either a cad, a tart, or a bitch. Even the show's official goody-goody, Dr Collin (Andrew Lancel), is having an extra- marital affair with a nurse.
To some, Cardiac Arrest may look like a heinous slur on the NHS. There's incompe- tence and much cracking of sick jokes at the expense of hapless patients who, so often, are viewed by doctors and nurses merely as an irritating obstruction to their endless bouts of bonking and drinking. But I'm told by doctor friends that it all represents a bare- ly exaggerated version of the real thing.
The typically dark, funny opening episode of the third series featured a man who had suffered a brain haemorrhage while making love to his spouse. Dr Mait- land, though dutifully sympathetic towards the soon-to-be-bereaved wife, clearly couldn't wait to switch off the life-support machine so that she could pass on a nice, healthy kidney to the man on the dialysis machine next door. It was all a long way from the mawkishness of ER, but to this cynic's eyes, a great deal more credible.
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