Cads, E-type Jags and naughty nurses . . . what a brilliant birth!
FaNTaSy NoVElIST Sir Terry Pratchett’s theory of ideas says that all our clever notions come from outer space, zinging through the atmosphere like background radiation. When they collide with a human head, it creates a brainwave.
Brainwaves such as these tend to come in clusters — which explains why so many inspirations occur to several people at the same time. Take evolution: no one worked that out for centuries and then Darwin and Wallace deduced it simultaneously.
Sir Terry’s thesis, improbable though it sounds at first, supplies the only logical explanation for this week’s TV schedules. How else could two hospital dramas about sex, set on obstetrics wards just before the discovery of the Pill, debut on different channels in the same week?
after Michael Sheen starred as sexologist Dr William Masters on Channel 4 on Tuesday, last night saw the birth of Breathless (ITV) with Jack Davenport as a suave, arrogant gynaecologist called Dr otto with a lucrative sideline in backstreet abortions.
Both dramas had been billed as raunchier versions of Mad Men. But with so much slap ’n’ tickle on telly this week, it was a relief to discover that Breathless owed much more to Call The Midwife.
This world was darker, of course, and much wealthier than the backstreets and tenements of Call The Midwife’s East london. The only people riding bicycles were helmeted bobbies. The doctors had RollsRoyces and Jaguar E-Types.
The storyline was a straightforward doctors- and- nurses r omance. ambitious Nurse Jeanie had snared herself a young gynaecologist, and was weaving a messy web of lies to keep him in her net.
Her formidable little sister, also a nurse, was threatening to tell the police about the abortion racket that was funding Dr otto’s lifestyle, and he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to brain her or bed her.
It could have been corny, if it had not had so much fun and flair about it. oliver Chris, who was born to play cads, stole every scene in which he appeared with Davenport, like a cocky sixth-former mocking his indulgent head teacher.
as Chris’s Dr Truscott staggered away from a late-night party to his Jag, we remembered how lightly the law used to treat drink driving. ‘let’s hope the roads are empty,’ murmured his hostess.
The roads weren’t empty at 8am, though. There was a lovely image of a suburban street after breakfast, with all the husbands kissing their housewives goodbye at the garden gates and driving off in a convoy of Hillmans and Fords.
It was a beautifully choreographed shot, and a promising sign of things to come. This show is prepared to take pains. If you were looking for indications of what’s to come, the service revolver on Davenport’s desk is certain to obey the playwright Chekhov’s rule on guns: ‘Never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.’
The articulated lorries in Truckers (BBC1) were as dangerous as any gun. as middle-aged lorry driver Malachi staggered through divorce, mid-life crisis and mental breakdown all at once, it was inevitable that he would use his truck to pursue his love rival and run him off the road.
What’s the point of an 18-wheel pantechnicon if you can’t use it as a weapon occasionally?
Stephen Tompkinson, best-known as DCI Banks in the ITV crime series, was obviously enjoying writer William Ivory’s verbose script. High-flown and high-falutin’, it was replete with the orotund rodomontade that was David Threlfall’s trademark in Shameless. In other words, it was full of fancy language that no one really uses.
If Malachi had been the only one to talk this way, Truckers might have got away with it. But everyone was doing it and the script quickly started to sound like stylised claptrap.
This was the first of a five-part series, with one episode focused on each of the truckers at a northern haulage firm called Banks of England. It was a halfway-entertaining comedy drama with a daft ending.
But like any hour of television that doesn’t quite make sense, it left you with that feeling of bewilderment and the familiar complaint: ‘That was a load of rubbish, then.’