Like real life, on bad day

Press, 30 September 1983, Page 15

Like real life, on bad day

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Ken Strongman

Is there an American obsession with illness, accident and disease? Is it a worldwide obsession? Or do doctors and nurses just make popular television? Whatever it is, Thursday evenings now have “St Elsewhere” racing to the screen neck and neck with the ever-watchable repeats of “The Professionals.” It is sired by “Hill Street Blues” out of “M.A.S.H.”

At times, it adopts that, intricate, rapid action, cryptic approach in which many people talk at once. The aim of this style seems to be to mimic real life at peak time at a major air terminal. This might be realistic, but it does make it very difficult to hear what is actually being said or work out what is happening. Perhaps it is like real life, at least on a bad day. Should series such as this continue, they will almost certainly become ever more impenetrable. By degrees, no-one will be able to understand them, although they will be watched avidly by those who create and follow cults. The cult followers will describe them as “great” and yet will be

unable to articulate a single meaningful sentence about them. Not that “St Elsewhere” has quite reached this stage. Apart from its modern stylistic cacophony, it is an attempt to play at sick, black humour. People eat and chat over autopsies in the morgue and they make jokes as patients fall like flies about them. All human life is here, in melodramatic excess, as it moves from one vignette to another. Had the television vignette not been discovered, such programmes would droop into flaccidity. Thus the scene shifts from one pithy encounter to the next as pathos and bathos are writ large. In spite of all this and against one’s better judgment, it does have some absorbing moments.

Also, on Thursdays, the second series of “Tenko” is

beginning to become a bit heavy. 111-kempt ladies, and others, struggle to remain courteous as they shriek at each other about life, death, abortion, illness and disease (you can’t go far on TV without it). Conditions change but rarely improve for them as their stereotypically cruel Japanese captors subject them to everything other than the fate worse than death. Like “St Elsewhere,” “Tenko” has its absorbing sequences. There is the occasional five-minute stretch from which one surfaces with an embarrassed shaking of the head in the realisation that one’s attention has been captured and imprisoned with the women. There are anomalies though. Given their privations, by now all the women

should be wasting away, becoming less attractive and scrawnier by the episode. But no; some seem to grow more attractive, not that one notices this sort of thing in these challenging days — someone just mentioned it to me. And some seem to be putting on a little flesh rather than losing it. Perhaps they are stealing food.

Finally, a word about advertisements. We have entered the silly season, adverts being changed whimsically. “Don’t make love to the bottle baby; go and make a cup of tea.” A cup of tea. Who are they kidding? This will simply sell more liquor. However, if it is advert changing time, how about some moral principle to change the “Le specs, le tough” advert? To some of us it is deeply distasteful to keep seeking le limpwrist throwing le sunnies to le ground. Le French, le poufterres.