Nurse
BBC Two
****
Critical
Sky1 *****
Some will say that Paul Whitehouse and David Cummings’s Nurse is too real to be funny. I’d say it is too real not to be, for while mental illness is not amusing, its symptoms sometimes are. The nurse in Nurse is a community mental health nurse called Liz, part of whose job is to keep a straight face. She drives between her “service users” trying to fit in her unsatisfactory life, and unsatisfactory lunch, between stops. She is played with precision by Esther Coles, but it is not her show. Liz is not a comic character.
Her clients (or “nutters”, as some of them self-diagnose) are. If the thin line between a troubled life and a dishevelled mind is a medical distinction, in Nurse it is a comedic one. The sitcom also prompts the question whether some of these “nutters” are mentally ill or simply lonely and unloved. In the first of the homes Liz visits, the bereaved Lorrie is getting on quite well with the friend she has in Jesus. It is her garrulous courtly lover, her neighbour Maurice who is delusional, unable to recognise she hates him.
Maurice, like all Liz’s male patients, is played by Paul Whitehouse. With equal mastery Whitehouse is also: the mordantly obese Graham, being fed to death by his mother ; Billy, a country and western fan with anger management issues; Ray, a bipolar ex-pop musician; Gary, a tense carer of his Alzheimic mother; and Herbert, an elderly classical musician who hears voices. It is Herbert, who brings the programme’s argument about insanity and sadness, comedy and pathos, full circle. He is the funniest of the grotesques, blurting out suddenly: “Did I say that or just think it?” He is also the most poignant. “Oh God,” he laments, “this world.”
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The one problem with Nurse is that Whitehouse has done it before. It is born out of The Fast Show, Down the Line and Bellamy’s People (Simon Day even has a walk on). Most of the characters are familiar to us: Graham is either Graham Downes from Bellamy’s People or a near relative. Specifically it reworks Whitehouse and Chris Langham’s sitcom Help, in which Langham played a therapist to Whitehouse’s menagerie of misery. Nurse is not even the best of these — but Whitehouse being Whitehouse, this hardly detracts from my admiration.
I subtract nothing at all from my initial praise for Jed Mercurio’s trauma room drama Critical, whose third episode last night showed that its real-time, single-location format is no more a restraint to great writing than the rules of the Petrarchan sonnet. We joined the fight to save a cyclist’s life 30 minutes into the “golden hour”. As intervention followed intervention, it looked as if Adam Richards was going to meet his maker in instalments. Lennie James as locum surgeon Glen Boyle was in an exceptionally bad mood, issuing encouragements such as: “That was piss poor but you will get better.” The outcome was expectation-defying. Its ramifications had time to play. Critical is the strongest drama on TV right now — and I don’t care what anyone says about Aidan Turner’s Poldark, Lennie James is television’s coolest man.