Paul Whitehouse

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.

You'll be amazed to learn that I've never served in the Armed Forces, so I can't say for sure whether Bluestone 42 is accurate. I haven't watched it much before either - this was the opener of the third series - so I haven't spent time with the characters. It wasn't uproariously funny, but at least rang true. It began with an armoured vehicle being hit by an IED, just as those inside were making some pretty sick jokes about a colleague who'd lost an eye. The language was fruitier than Um Bongo and the badinage was, almost literally, gallows humour.

Getting this right - mining humour from genuine peril, in a real-life scenario - may be a stretch too far for a low-budget BBC Three comedy. But I'm glad they're trying, and I wonder what happens to these shows when BBC Three "goes online". The worry is that the lowest comic denominator fills the void, and new writers or voices that might have cut their teeth finding comedy in tragedy and so on will be left sifting through video clips or doing Paul Whitehouse's prosthetics.

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.

The sketch show with a brilliant star

There's no way to overstate how good the make-up is. Paul Whitehouse first bounced into frame as Maurice, an 80-year-old Jewish motormouth with no sense of when he wasn't wanted. One scene later, he was morbidly obese Graham, spilling over the sides of his armchair like Dolly Parton in a boob tube.

How we pulled off Paul Whitehouse's many looks

A picture gallery of Paul Whitehouse being made-up for his roles in Nurse.

What makes a radio comedy funny on TV?

Paul Whitehouse's Nurse was an audio treat, now it's a visual treat too. What's the secret, asks Jasper Rees.

Nurse, review: 'a beautiful bedside manner'

Paul Whitehouse's well-observed comedy came from the heart, says Michael Hogan.