Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Medical O'Mara-cle

ICON! Doctors, BBC One, 1.40pm

Kate O'Mara (!!!) is in Doctors today.

That is all.

Labels: BBC One, doctors, exciting guest appearances, if you only ever watch one episode of whatever programme this preview is about in your life make it this one, Kate O'Mara, medicine, TV

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Thursday, February 14, 2008

Comedy of (potentially fatal) errors

CAUTIONARY! Bizarre ER, BBC Three, 10.30pm

BBC Three continues its trailblazing foray into high-quality multi-platform televisual goodness tonight with this not necessarily supposed to be funny (it's BBC Three; who knows) documentary series in which Crossroads star Freema Agyeman talks us through some of "the most extraordinary and eye-watering cases to come through the doors of a busy British A&E department". This first episode features pratfalls galore, with a poledancer who's fallen off her pole and a man who's fallen into an industrial cement mixer. Sounds bizarre? That's Bizarre ER! There's also a golfer who's smashed a golf ball into his girlfriend's teeth! Sounds bizarre? That's Bizarre ER! Then there's the student who's trapped his testicles under a sixty kilogram gearbox! Ooof! Sounds bizarre? That's Bizarre ER! A man with a bucket on his head! Sounds bizarre? That's Bizarre ER! An alcoholic who gets her thumb caught in the neck of a wine bottle, then gets drunk and forgets about it, goes to do her recycling a bit later, throws it into a bottle bank, smashes the bottle - thus releasing her thumb - but accidentally slashes open her wrist AND gets her arm stuck in the bottle bank at the same time! Sounds bizarre? That's Bizarre ER! An uninsured farmer who accidentally loses both arms and the best part of a foot when he tries to rescue a kitten from the thresher, thus completely destroying his livelihood! Also, the kitten doesn't survive either! Meowch! Sounds bizarre? That's Bizarre ER! A lollipop lady who gets caught up in a multi-vehicle pile-up involving - bizarrely! - a lorry containing a large quantity of lollipops, which goes on to explode right next to a petrol station, erupting in a ball of flame, blasting twisted metal and debris in all directions and impaling a number of passers-by and amateur heroes on wheel axles and shards of glass. There's blood everywhere - I mean, everywhere, right - and in amongst the pools of fire and dismembered limbs and general devastation one of the paramedics gets a nasty bump on the head from a 'MIND YOUR HEAD' sign! Whoops! Sounds bizarre? That's Bizarre ER! A ballerina who almost drowns and is pecked half to death when she stumbles into a 'Swan Lake'! Yikes! Sounds bizarre? That's Bizarre ER! A cleaner who falls into a vat of bleach! Sounds bizarre? That's Bizarre ER! Well, you get the general idea.

Labels: BBC3, Bizarre ER, medicine, pratfalls, TV

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Saturday, February 02, 2008

The bleak Miss Winters

SHOCK! Casualty, BBC1, 8.20pm

In a world of vastly depleted natural resources, Casualty doesn't usually match the recycling targets of The Bill (or indeed Holby City) for sheer volume of recognisable people (‘actors’, if you will) who were pretend people (‘characters') in other things but are now pretend people ('characters') in this thing, but there’s always a little room (‘cubicle’) in Holby City Hospital’s emergency department for recognisable people (‘actors’) from other long-running serial dramas (‘seridrams’) to find a new home. Slightly worryingly, it’s a Brookside-heavy cast at the moment, with old hand Suzanne Packer recently joined by fellow former Brookie babes/Liver birds/Scouse skirt etc Sunetra Sarker and Gillian Kearney. So if the lead goes missing from the hospital roof, you know which lockers to check first. (Sorry!)

However, queen of the current Casualty soap graduates is, of course, frosty Brand New Doctor Ruth Winters, played by the phenomenally talented and hugely sympathetic Georgia Taylor, aka Our Toyah Battersby from Coronation Street. During her initial shifts, her main function seemed to be to make endearingly hapless fellow Brand New Doctor Toby look even more useless, with Ruth effortlessly breezing through advanced brain surgery and transfiguration while Toby struggled to thread a needle and operate double doors. But after twenty-four weeks (twenty-four weeks!), Toby’s confidence has grown and his colleagues have taken him to their collective bosom, while Ruth’s offhand manner and relentless ambition have left her on the periphery of the team alongside the warm corpses, lab rats and MRSA.

But naturally Ruth's aloof for a reason. Her drunken father hit her! Her depressed mother killed herself! Charlie Fairhead snapped at her on her first day! Only last week, a Banksyesque graffiti artist painted a big, beautiful mural of the Holby staff, but depicted Ruth without a face! And every so often she slips up badly and goes to great lengths to conceal her mistakes. Which she usually manages to do, but not tonight. So Ruth goes on to do something rather extreme and not entirely expected, and the world quite literally (not literally, obviously) falls apart.

Basically, after twenty-one years (twenty-one years!), including at least ten years in the doldrums with generally draggy plots and irritating characters, Casualty is really, properly good again, and Georgia Taylor is a major force in this resurgence of goodness. And the mediseridram continues to entice and impress next week, with the ridiculously hot Rhys Thomas from Star Stories guest starring as the team look back over events leading up to tonight's 'thing', while Harry Harper leafs through Ruth's diary and, presumably, furrows his brow a lot. Hindsightastic! And very sad.

Labels: BBC1, Casualty, Georgia Taylor is completely amazing, medicine, TV

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Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Take these docs away from me

KENSIT! Holby City, BBC1, 8.00pm

Last September, Sadie King didn’t leave Emmerdale in a little plane with Cain Dingle after kidnapping her father-in-law and pretending to get shot, but she did leave Emmerdale, and soap fans would have been forgiven for thinking that they’d seen the last of the character, that the programme would carry on pretty much as it had before and that not very much had really changed, whether for better or worse. Nonetheless, tonight we finally get to find out what happened to Sadie after Cain left her, penniless and alone, on that remote airstrip in North Yorkshire.

Poverty has done Sadie the world of good. Left with nothing but the clothes on her back and a pair of gigantic eyes, she’s fallen back on her natural resourcefulness, reapplied her lip gloss and headed for Holby City Hospital (via the Persian Gulf). Of course, Sadie’s reputation precedes her, so she’s been forced to adopt a new identity and reinvented herself as Faye Morton, a seemingly nice nurse with gigantic eyes, clothes on her back and a gaping, Dubai-shaped hole in her employment records.

Sadie's first day basically involves a lot of hanging around trying to get the generally appalling Holby City staff to give her a job, and, with gigantic eyes being in short supply among the current cast, they do just that. Cleverly, her extensive Yorkshire-based exploits and back-story aren’t referred to at all this week, leaving the casual viewer as much in the dark about her self-serving, double-crossing, money-grabbing past as her new colleagues.

Elsewhere, it seems that the Kensit-sized salary has eaten into the props budget, with a couple of bargain-basement sub-plots involving elastic bands and scratchcards, and probably some more scenes with that smug new surgical consultant trying to turn the car park into a putting green, or whatever it is he's always doing out there. But most eyes – gigantic or otherwise – will be on Sadie, with viewers wondering how long we'll have to wait until the warm, compassionate exterior slips and we’re treated to an icy glimpse of soap’s twenty-seventh-or-eighth Best Bitch Of All Time’s true character and motives. Of course, a little surgery on her name blows the whole façade apart already: simply splice the new alias together with her old name and what do you get? Faye King! The mysterious woman is Faye King, everybody! As Betty Eagleton might say: we've got the measure of you, lady.

Labels: BBC1, gigantic eyes, Holby City, medicine, TV

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