Esther Coles

"Was Bowie really a bender or was he putting it on?" is one of the questions that come tumbling from the mouth of former glam-rocker Ray, a "service user" visited by the titular mental health professional in Nurse (Wednesday, 11pm, Radio 4). Ray feels that everybody did better than he did: Bolan, Springsteen and, unaccountably, Peter Andre.

Like all the male characters in this serious comedy, Ray is played by Paul Whitehouse, who created the show along with David Cummings. The nurse, played by Esther Coles, provides reassurance to each of them, from the bed-bound middle-aged man who lives with his mother to Ray, still furious that his star-spangled peers managed to spin out their careers longer than he did.

Radio Times review

Paul Whitehouse and David Cummings's funny, moving and meaningful comedy about Esther Coles's community psychiatric nurse Liz allows some flashes of optimism in a most unexpected quarter this week: morbidly obese Graham appears to have found a girlfriend.

Of course everything remains trying for poor Liz in an episode that considers the scarcity of resources for the vital service she provides. We also meet a soldier with post-traumatic stress in scenes that are incredibly affecting - but also eerily plausible.

The techniques Liz uses are based on actual remedies and approaches that are being used right now.

BBC Two's newest comedy drama c]Nurse] is written by and stars Paul Whitehouse as a cavalcade of characters. Originally airing on Radio 4, the programme sees Esther Coles star as Liz; a community psychiatric nurse with a number of colourful patients. Whitehouse appears in almost every scene and in the first episode played a total of six characters. As with a lot of character-based comedy not every situation hit the mark especially one in which Simon Day played Whitehouse's former prison roommate. Whitehouse is now stranger to playing multiple characters having done so in everything from The Fast Show to those ubiquitous Aviva adverts. However I don't think his brand of humour quite fit the subject matter of Nurse[/] which at times felt quite dark. For a show that's billed as a comedy first and foremost I didn't laugh once but then again I didn't know if I was really supposed to. This was a problem for me as their was an imbalance of tone between Whitehouse's broad humour and the sensitive subjects that Liz had to deal with during her rounds. Whitehouse has perfectly mixed pathos and humour before, most notably in his underrated sitcom Happiness, however I don't think Nurse stands up against the comedian's former offerings. Thankfully there are some bright spots in Nurse most notably Esther Coles who is perfectly convincing as the harassed Nurse Liz. In my opinion I found the most successful scenes were the ones in which Liz was on her own talking to on her phone to her kids or her estranged husband. Similarly Liz's meeting with the brilliant Rosie Cavallero's Cat Lady was the first episode's most moving scene. This leads me to believe that Whitehouse's insistence on playing the majority of the characters is a hindrance to Nurse's overall success. Had he simply selected to play one role than I feel that I would've enjoyed Nurse a lot more than I actually did.

Nurse was both unexpected and wholly predictable, in that you could put safer money on Paul Whitehouse (and Esther Coles) excelling than on any Cheltenham nag. Mental health has of course been explored with increasing and justifiable interest, in comedy and drama and documentary, but seldom, Jo Brand excluded, with such bittersweet wit.

Whitehouse, playing many of what one of his characters is more than happy to call the "nutters", catches, with astonishing nuance, the great many tics and self-serving justifications, and grievances (and impairments) both wholly real and wholly imagined, of the umbrella under which we still lump the impossibly diverse characteristics of the "mentally ill". Coles, as Nurse, exudes, not least in her snatched in-car meals and phone calls, the scale of the Sisyphean task she has chosen. As so often these days, we're left questioning whether circumstance begets mental ill-health, or vice quite versa.

I hesitate ever to use the word "valuable" of a comedy, but it is.

Nurse was one of the radio comedies upgraded with moving pictures. Esther Coles was terrific as Liz, a careworn Community Psychiatric Nurse administering salutary chats and sedatives to a whole host of comic grotesques.

The grotesques were all played by Paul Whitehouse, as they seemingly always are. Whitehouse has been shapeshifting outrageously for many years, first in The Fast Show, then in 2005's Help (a similar endeavour where he played each of a psychiatrist's 20 or so patients), but most recently in a series of adverts for car insurance. This has had the unfortunate effect of making what should be virtuoso appear merely so-so. In Nurse his transformations were a distraction from what was a rather wonderful study of those who need help and those who give it.

Small strands of Liz's home life were dotted around the periphery - an ex-husband, a teenage son, both at the other end of the phone - suggesting that this was a series with legs. Take out the Whitehouse showboating and you had something both funny and poignant. So much recent TV comedy seems to have become very, very sad - Nurse was similar in timbre to Getting On (set in a hospital geriatric ward) or Ricky Gervais's Derek (set in a nursing home). All a world away from the karaoke catchphrase comedies of the Nineties where kids would be trilling 'Suits you sir,' the next day. Comedy has become essentially non comic.

In Nurse Paul Whitehouse has, with co-writer David Cummings, adapted this multi-role comedy, almost literally fleshing out the characters with much aid from prosthetics.

He plays most of the patients - or service users, as NHS jargon now has it - of the eponymous nurse, Liz (beautifully played by Esther Coles). She's a community psychiatric nurse and in last night's opening episode of four we followed her as she attended to her charges - which seems to involve injecting most of them in the bum with their medication - while visiting them in their homes.

As first sight Liz's patients may seem to be a gallery of grotesques - they include Graham, a morbidly obese young man who can barely move from his bed, a psychotic, agoraphobic ex-prisoner Billy, and ageing lech Herbert (shades of The Fast Show's Rowley Birkin), long past his many sexual conquests - but they are beautifully observed and carefully constructed individuals, people we laugh with, not at.

Whitehouse and Co (aided by Ian Fitzgibbon's adroit direction) capture the huge array of mental health issues, and intelligently address the very real problem that some sufferers have - of people close to them with whom they are in dangerously co-dependent relationships. It's a recognised phenomenon that a loved one can still be jealous of the person getting, as they see it, all the attention, or that they fear the patient becoming well and leading an independent life means their role within it diminishes, and so may try to scupper their recovery.

Other roles in a very strong cast are filled by, among others, Ben Bailey-Smith (aka Doc Brown) as a joky police officer Liz deals with on a frequent basis; Whitehouse's old confrere Simon Day, as Billy's controlling friend Tony; and Rosie Cavaliero, who like Whitehouse plays more than one role - Graham's overfeeding mum and April, a woman who lives alone with her monstrous regiment of cats, eating the same food: "If it's good enough for my little darlings, it's good enough for me."

Nurse is full of pathos and there are no Fast Show punchlines or catchphrases, but there are many, many laughs - often slipped in as throwaway lines or there to undercut the poignancy.

Created with evident affection for the institution of the NHS, and a deep respect for those working in it, Nurse has a real emotional pull while supplying some snortingly good comedy. Warmly recommended.

Another radio comedy gets a TV transfer. This time, Paul Whitehouse parades his chameleonic character-acting skills in a more worthwhile setting than those damned insurance ads. His straight woman is Esther Coles's community mental health nurse Liz, whose daily rounds see her lending a therapeutic ear to everyone from dotty old dears to brittle ex-cons. A few of the characters veer close to stereotype but this is deftly performed, with a layer of melancholic empathy below its gentle surface.

Radio Times review

Paul Whitehouse, David Cummings and Esther Coles's accomplished Radio 4 comedy, which engaged intelligently with mental health issues, has here been sensitively rescaled for the small screen.

Coles plays a community nurse meeting an array of characters (some new and mainly played by Whitehouse). They include Billy the agoraphobic ex-con, Herbert the ageing rake and - probably most memorably - the morbidly obese Graham who is engaged in a terrible, co-dependent relationship with his obsessive mother and her revoltingly unhealthy cooking.

There are nose-snortingly outrageous laughs aplenty as we'd expect from any Whitehouse stable. But, thanks to the judiciousness and ebullience of the writing and the tenderness and skill of the performances, they never detract from the narrative's essential humanity and warmth.

Video: Paul Whitehouse on mental health comedy Nurse

Paul Whitehouse is known for his larger than life characters, catchphrases and 25 year partnership with Harry Enfield.

This week, he returns to our screens - but his new series takes on an issue that's no laughing matter.

Nurse follows the life of an overstretched community mental health health worker, played by Esther Coles, as she does her daily rounds.

"There is nothing very funny about mental illness. Yet that's exactly the central theme in comedian Paul Whitehouse's latest show.

The four-part bittersweet comedy - already a radio success - is all about community psychiatric nurse Liz (played by RADA-trained actress Esther Coles) whom we follow doing her daily rounds.

"Nurse is a project close to my heart," explains Paul, 56, who co-wrote and starred in 90s hit The Fast Show.

"We've all got people who have experienced mental illness, and my mum was a community nurse for a while."

Each episode sees Liz visiting the homes of patients - or 'service users' as they're now called - who are all characters played by Paul.

Among them are an Alzheimer's sufferer and her frustrated son, a desperately lonely woman who only has her cats for company and a morbidly obese man with an unhealthy attachment to this mother.

Rather than mocking the vulnerable members of our community, Paul - who sought expert medical advice during filming - insists the show explores and raises awareness of important topics.

"People with mental health issues are more likely to talk about their problems," he says, "so this was a way of addressing them in a way that was heightened.

"But they're universal fears - loss of love and libido, loneliness, fear - these are things coming to us all.

"We're proud of the show and it would be nice if we got people talking more about mental health."