Hospital TV takes a passage to India
Good Karma Hospital was like the Royal Variety Show. It had a bit of everything. There was drama, pathos, prejudice and plenty of bedpan, sorry deadpan, humour.
Television series about police, fire, ambulance and the armed services regularly reinvent themselves.
It’s a matter of survival. The technology must be leading edge, the explosions bigger and the hoodlums criminally insane. But what can you do with medical dramas? Hospitals are hospitals, A and E series repeat themselves and bedpans look the same.
And so some bright TV executive, remembering MASH, said ‘‘why don’t you go offshore?’’
That man deserves a DB. Good Karma Hospital (UKTV Tuesdays) was more than born, it was delivered by a disillusioned junior doctor in a primitive birthing unit.
When Dr Ruby Walker is jilted at home, she sees an advert for staff at a luxurious Indian hospital that resembles the Taj Mahal with suppositories. But instead he ends up in the Good Karma Hospital, the Dhoni Clinic being a mirage somewhere in the future.
There she meets eccentric Dr Lydia Fonseca, kindly Dr Ram Nair and ruthless Dr Gabriel Varma, who’s lost his soul, his compassion and mislaid the Hippocratic Oath. Surgery is ‘‘butchery with needlework’’, he says.
Ruby confronts a waiting room of 100 patients standing in the sun and delivers her first baby, a girl. She then consoles the couple who wanted a son and claimed to see a penis at 12 weeks, but the X-ray was misleading. However, when Dr Varma tells her to ‘‘keep out of the way of real doctors’’, Ruby packs her bags, ready to leave.
Only Dr Fonseca persuades her to stay. ‘‘You’re a fully functioning human being,’’ she says, referring to Varma, who isn’t.
Good Karma Hospital was like the Royal Variety Show. It had a bit of everything. There was drama, pathos, prejudice and plenty of bedpan, sorry deadpan, humour. When Dr Varma attends the mother of the bride (Phyllis Logan) who collapses at her daughter’s society wedding, the husband inquires about how long he’ll be. ‘‘We’re paying for the elephant by the hour,’’ he grumbles. It may be mumbo jumbo to him, but it’s a brain tumour to her.
The first episode of Good Karma Hospital was a teasing scene setter. But the writers have to retain interest with some strong story lines. How a young English doctor copes in an underresourced community hospital isn’t going to do it. That’s flash in the pan.
Changing traditional methods of medical practice and improving hygiene standards could just succeed. That’s flush in the pan.
Now engaging a crude and bullying chef to host a programme on cocaine, might be a stroke of genius if he pulls it off. But I’m not convinced Gordon Ramsay achieved much at all. He probably snuffed it out.
He was chosen for his name. Gordon Ramsay on Cocaine (TV One, Tuesday) helps to sell TV series, nothing else. Ramsay spent part of his time in Honduras witnessing violence, shooting and cocaine distribution on a huge scale. Yes, he got down and dirty like he does in restaurants and interviewed a range of corrupt people, but he didn’t ask the right questions.
It’s a scoop to interview a drug dealer, but instead Ramsay asked him about lifestyle and how much money he made. What about confronting him about making people’s lives a misery?
One positive for Ramsay was to rid his own restaurants of cocaine. He could follow it up by getting rid of abuse and profanity.
I’ve always fancied myself playing a zombie. It’s the extent of my acting ability. Sadly, they don’t stand much chance in The Walking Dead (TV2, Mondays). All they did in the new series – full of unexplained, violent vignettes – is stagger about and look for someone to bite.
I’d prefer a zombie hierarchy where the head muncho at the top has dialogue with his drool, sentences with his slobber. It could be the thing that saves The Walking Dead. Nothing else is likely to.
Islands Of the Gulf (TV One, tonight) has charm. Elizabeth Easther revisits the islands of the Hauraki Gulf that her mum Shirley Maddock, a pioneering TV journalist, visited 50 years ago.
She talks to residents of Waiheke, Rakino and Great Barrier Islands, shows some native birds and films the milliondollar coastline. It was pleasant, but all a bit rushed.
Two things were different in the 1960s. New Zealand was still in black and white and Shirley sounded like the Queen. She could have commentated her coronation. Fortunately, we’re now in colour and we sound like ourselves.