Monroe
ITV1
Monroe disputes the writing class nostrum that a hero should be likeable. Whether the writer Peter Bowker was intending to do so in creating the brain surgeon Gabriel Monroe remains unclear. His new drama opened in Monroe’s operating theatre, and, with its snagging neon, it looked more like Frankenstein’s lab than a place of healing. Monroe was in the grip of a psychological condition that I am in no position to diagnose but could be logomania or Tourette’s: he was rude to everyone. His attitude needed checking in all sorts of ways. Would you bet on a surgeon who bet on the outcome of your operation with his anaesthetist?
Having James Nesbitt in the lead role, however, complicates matters, for Nesbitt is an actor utterly confident in his adorability. One may not always fall for his charms, but one feels that a majority will. Monroe is — natch — brilliant at his job. When he calls a patient’s tumour “you bastard”, it may take one to know one, but he is a bastard on our side. And near the end Bowker pressed his finger down on Monroe’s side of the scales by not only having his wife leave him but by revealing that his daughter died on the operating table. You almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
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But just as a surgeon may save a life with one brilliant stroke of his scalpel (I’m guessing), so Bowker resolved the difficulties presented by his ambivalent protagonist by having his foil, Sarah Parish’s fellow surgeon Jenny Bremner, declare herself “indifferent” to his “twinkly self-regard”. It’s a brilliant line, for it allowed us to get on and enjoy the show without taking a view on Monroe/Nesbitt. And it is quite a show, as fast talking as an Aaron Sorkin drama and as fast moving too, for the highly aphoristic dialogue tended to happen full pelt down a corridor of the West Wing, I mean St Matthew’s. Monroe lacks psychological depth, but has flashy intellectual confidence. After my misplaced enthusiasm for Silk, I’d prefer to keep my hand in my pocket, but were I to put money on whether this was ITV’s next big drama, I’d say it was.
The British at Work
BBC Four
At least it would be my hand. On Kirsty Young’s history of the postwar workplace, The British at Work, she interviewed a woman who, in her youth, had fallen for that old boss trick of asking his secretary to retrieve his hanky from his trouser pocket. Young allowed herself five minutes of nostalgia for postwar esprit de corps before presenting a Fifties workscape characterised by sexism, class division, trade union belligerence and sudden death. In a first for the BBC, she even found something bad to say about the Attlee Government, which in 1947 became convinced of the workers’ indolence and banned midweek greyhound racing. Today, however, she was pretty sure, we enjoy our jobs, believe they say something about us, and are treated with respect at work. She really must get that Doctor Pangloss on her Desert Island Discs.