A rascally baronet, a life well lived and a tragic visit to A&E
The helicopter shots that swoop through London’s glittering, double-glazed skyline at the start of 24 Hours In A&E (C4) ought to seem impossibly glamorous, like the opening sequence of eighties supersoap Dallas.
Trouble is, every episode of The Apprentice starts with just the same high-rise vistas. Now, we see a skyline of gleaming glass towers and instinctively brace ourselves for rampant berks and bimbos.
Will St George’s hospital be staffed by a chaotic mob of arrogant, talentless, inane, backstabbing airheads? Will they break the equipment, lose the patients and blow the entire NhS budget, before frantically blaming each other?
Thankfully, the business practices of Lord Sugar’s boardroom have not yet infected Britain’s hospital wards. The calm, compassionate demeanour of our nurses and doctors remains one of the most reassuring sights on television.
They’re all so fresh-faced, though. Once it was a sign of age to notice that policemen were getting younger. These days, the consultants look so juvenile that you catch yourself thinking: ‘What a nice boy. Bet his mum is proud of him.’
Of course, just like The Apprentice, 24 hours In A&e is TV constructed to a precise formula. As the tenth series began, all the elements were in place: three full-length case studies, interspersed with snatches of conversation from the waiting room, plus follow-up interviews with patients and medics. The best episodes are not about illness, but glimpsed insights into life itself.
Sir John Cockburn, an 89-year-old baronet, was admitted with a suspected internal bleed, his youngest son beside him, and it was a privilege to watch the touching display of humour and affection between them during the next few hours.
Sir John was a rascal, and happy to admit it. Asked about his booze intake, he announced: ‘I was a wine merchant but not an alcoholic.’ When doctors pressed him about how much he really drank, he said, evasively: ‘This is where the lying starts!’
his son, Jonathan, recalling what sounded like a blissfully ramshackle childhood, said that week-long parties had been no rarity for his parents. The five children went without TV or foreign holidays, ‘but they gave us love in bucketfuls’.
An appreciation of good living was also instilled: Jonathan knew about wine before he was eight, and sometimes went to school with half a pint of cider instead of Ready Brek to warm him up.
his upbringing left him with a profound sense of gratitude. Though he teased and joshed with the old feller, his hero-worship for his father was radiant. A mist of sadness hung over the scene, too, because both men were well aware these could be their last conversations.
So it proved. Sir John did not recover from surgery. his son was left with the consolation that, ten years earlier, he’d written a letter to his parents, a formal statement of his deep love for them both. But they surely knew anyway.
Medical care in Karachi adhered to different standards. english comedian Mawaan Rizwan, who recently plucked up the courage to tell his parents he was homosexual (they weren’t terribly pleased), returned to the country of his birth in How Gay Is Pakistan? (BBC3) and discovered tablets to turn him straight.
Mawaan met an imam, or priest, the Pakistani equivalent of a Texan TV evangelist, who warned the young man’s sexuality was putting him in danger. ‘People would want to eliminate you,’ he hissed, a look in his eye implying that, given a dark alley and half a brick, the holy man would willingly do it himself.
This imam was a full-blown quack, who took Mawaan’s pulse and diagnosed a ‘heated liver’, before prescribing an overpriced course of herbal tablets guaranteed to make him ‘attracted to ladies’.
Mawaan played along, but it was a rare flash of satirical comedy in a badly constructed documentary that seemed to go wherever the camera happened to be pointing.
In some places, it was too seedy and aggressive to bear, depicting a society where orgiastic immorality and male rape were commonplace. Mawaan couldn’t make sense of any of it — and that’s no use to viewers.