Hospital yarns go on for ever and a night shift

Press, 17 March 1982, Page 24

Hospital yarns go on for ever and a night shift

Review

Douglas McKenzie

It’s not that the TV doctors’ and nurses’ stories are not perfectly professional and plausible, it’s just that there seems no end to the number of corners of hospital life that this dramatic genre sets out to explore, no hospital theme too detailed to grapple with. Perhaps viewers, have never considered closely the exact number of millimetres in diameter the opening of a hospital potty should be for a Caucasian male aged 53 next’ birthday, but there is no reason to doubt that the subject is already under action in : a TV studio somewhere in North America and the results will be up next year or 1984 at the latest. Growing detail is inevitable. Even if TV should last for only the next 100 years this is going to amount to a lot of hospital stories when they are needed at the rate of not less than two a week.

This week “Nurse” (Two, Monday) had a nice, heartwarming yarn, and it was impeccably photographed,

but its eventual unfolding was as obvious as though the story line had been set up in neon lighting beside the reception desk in the first scene. It was just that this new nurse was a man. and no-one would accept him because he was not a woman, and he would prove himself in an emergency and become the heroine — that is, the hero of the ward. So it was women’s lib in reverse, and everyone was discouraging this plainly competent staff member ..oh the sole ground that he was a man. Of course he would win. and then the women's lib. or the anti-men’s lib, or whatever it is (it is certainly very confusing) would be sorry. Incidentally. Miss Michael Learned, with a name like that, has got a bundle to answer for. This episode of "Nurse” was called "Equal Opportunity”; but everyone knows that women never get an equal opportunity so the whole

thing was at best ironic and at worst cynical. ■’ “Nurse” was preceded by "Mr Merlin”. The effect of a total absence of a TV licence in the United States becomes clearer all the time: since people don’t pay for viewing (except l for the’ cost of the advertising in the products they buy) they can’t really complain about what they get served up. So they get served up with bilge. Mainly. “Mr Merlin" is simply a variation on the interminable stream of “magic" programmes which have always come, out of the home of Disneyland. At the start, when it was “Bewitched” and similar, it was fun. But they have never stopped and thej’ have never grown up. TV is. of course, a medium for children; it is simply bad programming that "Mr Merlin” is not relegated to the afternoon. The advertisements on TV

come in for a pretty persistent hammering, but there are one or two that deserve a prize for sheer viewability. One of these is the Smith and Smith ad with the Laurel and Hardy pair selling paint and so on. The conception is brilliant and the execution, with their final off-sound squabbling over rights and priorities, even more so. They are old friends welcome any time, and in grateful contrast to the painful paint seller across the Tasman who still rattles a can and fails to strike the right note.