James Wood

James Wood's comedy set in the days of experimental Victorian medicine continues to delight and engross, even at its most gross. Tonight, Caroline has her first curry, William is doubled up with abdominal pains from a bladder stone that Robert is eager to operate on, and Tom is writing narrative poetry on chloroform. The centrepiece, however, is Robert's recollection of his days stranded on a desert island, which involved turtle riding and pelican tackling.

This rollicking medical farce set in a convincingly pungent Victorian London comes courtesy of James Wood, co-creator of Rev. A talented cast - including Rory Kinnear as a fame-hungry sawbones, Tom Basden as a cocaine-fuelled dentist and Mathew Baynton as a wide-eyed alienist - amp up their performances to match the fevered plotting, while hawkish Rupert Everett swoops in to steal scenes as mercurial royal physician Dr Hendrick.

How accurate is Quacks

James Wood reveals the real-life Victorian doctors who inspired his new comedy Quacks.

Quacks: a medical comedy that will have you in stitches

Rory Kinnear's leonine sawbone leads the cast in a gloriously grim and hilarious trip into the rock'n'roll world of Victorian medicine.

Preview: Quacks

Victorian medical comedy Quacks begins Tuesday 15th August on BBC Two. Sophie Davies has had a sneak peak at the much anticipated new series...

Quacks: one of the most original new shows of the year

"I gave myself a medical historical education and puked it back out as comedy", says Rev creator James Wood of his new BBC2 comedy Quacks. Gerard Gilbert meets the writer and cast members Rory Kinnear and Mathew Baynton.

World speed record for leg amputation in BBC's Quacks

The packed operating theatre falls silent as Rory Kinnear's showman surgeon announces that he will now break the world speed record of 92 seconds for a leg amputation.

Third and final part of Rev creator James Wood's tart spin on the Evelyn Waugh classic, an adaptation that has remained commendably true to the rather cruel source material. After his dodgy trip to Marseilles, hapless schoolteacher and would-be stag Paul Pennyfeather (Jack Whitehall) finds himself unexpectedly in a place with lots of bars but no drink. Surely his glamorous fiancee Margot (Eva Longoria) has not forsaken him? Heads will roll.

A grand surprise arrived on Friday in the shape of Decline and Fall. It shouldn't, perhaps, have been that much of a surprise, given that the man responsible for adapting Evelyn Waugh's first published (and most splenetically Welsh-hating, liberal-baiting) novel was James Wood, also responsible for the ever-subtle Rev., and that the casting was able to plumb such glorious heights as Stephen Graham, Douglas Hodge, David Suchet and Eva Longoria.

For once, an adaptation caught Waugh's inner voice, that singular interwar fruity whine of pomp, self-pity and high intellect, the all leavened by an utterly redemptive sense of the absurdity of the human condition, particularly Waugh's own. Crucially, this was achieved without resort to the artifice of narrative voiceover, à la Brideshead. Wood just picked his quotes very cleverly. In episode one (of three), Jack Whitehall's beleaguered Everyman is sent down from Oxford (with an achingly unfair whiff of un-trouser-edness) and reduced to teaching in the boondocks, where every pupil is as damaged, yet at least 10 times as smart, as the masters. He soon alights on the ultimate piece of time-wasting for his spoilt charges, "an essay on self-indulgence. There will be points for the longest, irrespective of any possible merit."

There are the stock grotesques, yes - even Douglas Hodge, as the chief sot/pederast, doesn't get to chew the scenery with quite the liberated zest of David Suchet's headmaster, reacting to freedom from all those dreary Poirots as would a vampire released on virgin necks, toothily telling Whitehall's straight-bat ingenu that "we schoolmasters must temper discretion with... deceit" - but, by and large, this is happily grounded more in realism than caricature. What emerges is a true comic fantasy, yes, but also one which captures that dreadful damp twixt-war tristesse: a certain boredom with politics, a certain class obsession, an irresolute yet total anger at... something. An End of Days. This BBC production, in which all excel, is thrillingly timely, given our fractious nation's rude recent decision to Decline, and Flail, and also gives trembling hope that, finally, we might get a faithful rendition of the wisest funny novel of the 20th century, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim.

Decline And Fall review

Imagine such a bygone world where someone would get a job they are ill-suited for, simply because they are posh. How foolish! Still, it will be interesting to see how George Osborne's London Evening Standard reviews the new BBC One adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's stinging social satire Decline And Fall.