Vicki Pepperdine

It's a struggle for the Getting On nurses - to decide if they can take a dead patient's cake

Curiously, it reminded me of Dinnerladies, which Victoria Wood wanted shot as this is: naturalistically. It is very female and unfazed by death.

One of the clues to successfully turning an in-joke into an out-joke is to trust people to get it without too much signalling. Getting On, a comedy set in an under-resourced geriatric ward, clearly understands this, beginning in a way so indifferent to the arrival of newcomers (us, watching) that you almost feel you should cough to let them know you're there.

Sister Flixter is sitting by an old lady's bedside, one hand checking her texts, the other clasping the patient's limp hand. The camera pans slowly to show a cake - "Happy Birthday Lily 87" - and then, without any fuss, it becomes apparent that Lily isn't going to be eating any of it. It's the kind of detail that might be played for cheap pathos in a different kind of series, but here - without a line of script - it very effectively delivers a key signature. This is a comedy about a place where the bleakly mortal and the banal are continually rubbing up against each other.

Sister Flixter didn't have much time to worry about Lily because a something distracted her, a coil of excrement discovered on a ward chair by Nurse Wilde (Jo Brand). To Nurse Brand, this is "shit". To Sister Flixter, it's a "critical incident", which will require the requisite NHS paperwork and to Dr Moore (Vicki Pepperdine), it is a "faecal deposit" and valuable raw material for her current research. For want of a stool pot the stained chair was pushed into an alcove behind hazard tape, where it is still odorously contributing to the ward's atmosphere of mismanagement when the new matron turned up later to add yet another chief to a tribe already short on Indians. That's the central joke of Getting On - of priorities and interests competing so effectively that virtually nothing gets done - though "joke" is too crude a word for the stealthy way in which the humour bubbles up through the cracks.

Written by its three leads and directed by Peter Capaldi, Getting On is in the tradition of The Office and The Thick of It, rather than Only When I Laugh or Green Wing. You can feel the grit of real events inside the comedy, such as the ludicrous attempt to translate the genial babblings of a patient speaking some unidentified Indian language (they discover she's been saying "I want to die. Please kill me") or the closing moment when Sister Flixter and Nurse Wilde found themselves having to mumble their condolences to Lily's sister, through mouths still filled with the dead woman's cake. And the most surreal gags turn out to be true. Dr Moore's strange obsession with the patient's bowel movements turns out to be the result of an ambition to "expand the Bristol Stool Chart from the current seven to an exhaustive 37 types of patient faeces". Wonderfully, the Bristol Stool Chart really does exist, a turd-spotter's identification chart that runs the fecal gamut from "hard lumps, like nuts" to "entirely liquid". Getting On doesn't feature on it anywhere.

There are some real loud laughs to be had from Getting On, but they aren't comfortable, as this is a black, black comedy set in one of the more decrepit outposts of the NHS. Co-writers and stars Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine are the hopelessly incompetent staff of a pitiful geriatric ward. Brand and Scanlan are nurses rendered almost immobile by their own indolence and stupidity, while Pepperdine is a doctor who can't see her way past politically correct, coy euphemisms, as in "the deceased party" for "dead woman".

Getting On bears the fingerprints of The Thick of It, and not just because Peter Capaldi directs. It has the same ruthlessly naturalistic, documentary feel as its mighty predecessor and leaves the same lingering feeling that beneath the humour there's something very serious going on.

This is followed by Jo Brand's superb new comedy, Getting On. Set in the geriatric ward of an NHS hospital, it is centred around four brilliantly observed members of staff - a nurse newly returned to the NHS (Jo Brand), a subtly insane nursing sister (Joanna Scanlan), a male matron (Ricky Grover) and a brittle doctor (Vicki Pepperdine). Directed by Peter Capaldi, it is filmed in the verité style of The Office and The Thick of It using shaky cameras and dialogue that sounds overheard rather than scripted. It was the wonderful surprise of the week.

Here's something to savour from writer/stars Joanna Scanlan, Vicki Pepperdine, Jo Brand and director Peter Capaldi (The Thick Of It) - an extraordinarily funny, jet-black three-part sitcom set in a miserable NHS geriatric ward where the nurses are hopelessly bounded by bureaucracy and political correctness. Frighteningly familiar at times - which is surely partly down to the fact Brand used to be a nurse herself before she launched into stand-up.

You really shouldn't laugh. That's what you'll keep telling yourself during the first episode of this dazzlingly low-key new comedy set in a geriatric ward.

But it's no good putting on your politically correct face and sitting there tutting, because this is a relentlessly funny, workplace comedy that is right up there with The Thick Of It or The Office.

Part of the BBC's coyly titled Grey Expectations strand about the joys of ageing, the morbid humour is as black as death itself. Produced on a budget that would barely cover hair and make-up on Ugly Betty, it's written by Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine who also star as the self-interested, bored and incompetent medical staff. To add to its credentials, it's directed by Peter Capaldi, most famous of course as The Thick Of It's explosive spin doctor Malcolm Tucker.

Brand, as everyone knows, used to be a nurse in a psychiatric hospital which must surely account for the way that every horrible detail is so ruthlessly observed. You feel you could be watching a documentary filmed by an undercover C4 researcher with a camera hidden in a bed pan.

As the patronising, brisk, and utterly ineffectual Dr Pippa Moore (obsessed tonight with a poo that has been left on a chair), Pepperdine is absolutely spot-on and instantly recognisable, while the team's joint dealings with a patient who speaks no English are toe-curlingly sublime.

But just remember, you really shouldn't laugh.

Is it a play, or is it a pilot for a wild and wacky series in which those staples of the comedy sketch scene Mel Hudson and Vicki Pepperdine play two women who formerly worked together as a comedy double act, but are now living in semi-retirement in South London with their families? Time, and commissioning editors, will tell. Either way, fans of the duo will not be disappointed as the two combine global observations about the parlous state of the planet with "tell me about it" details of the life of the modern parent. Thus, while the two are approached by the Government to come up with a solution to the problems of climate change, their biggest concern is nits, of every definition.