Getting On

It's the final episode of Jo Brand's blacker-than-black comedy set on an NHS geriatric ward, and what a missed opportunity it has proven: only three episodes long and ferreted away on BBC4. Tonight, Brand's nurse Kim has to partake in a jargon-strewn 'conflict resolution strategy' after her bawdy humour hits a sensitive target, Den and Dr Pippa tie themselves in knots over who exactly has won the raffle prize (a hamper), and the stool research continues. Bleak but brilliant.

Getting On with hospital comedy

Who would have thought a sitcom set in an NHS ward could be so tragic, moving and hilarious? We want more.

Peter Capaldi on directing Getting On

Peter Capaldi (amongst other things, Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It and In The Loop) is director of BBC Four's new series Getting On, whose naturalistic presentation has drawn favourable comparison to the political comedy in which Peter stars.

Getting On gets better. Somehow Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine have created a comedy about a modern NHS ward that is piercingly weird, coldly plausible, heartbreaking and hilarious. This week, a foul-mouthed racist OAP went on the rampage, delivering a bloody nose to the new male matron, who desperately tried to remember his stay-calm management training module as his nose bled.

The humour in Getting On is stealthy: the harassed doctor searched for her stool samples, hustled pathetically for a car-parking space and saw not that many patients - then looked at her lined face in the toilet and wondered where the years had gone. This moving reverie was interrupted by the head nurse rapping on the door, insisting that it should never be locked. The doctor she fancied, played by The Thick of It's Peter Capaldi (who also directs Getting On), looked past her at a much younger model. The comedy in Getting On is as wincing as The Thick of It, with the added pathos of near-death patients wheezing their last. Or not, as happened this week, with the sudden, vexing recovery of one.

TV Review: Getting On

In the beginning I thought it was trying to hard to be quirky and sardonic, but as the episode wore on and settled down, it was a real treat to watch.

Ward B4 is a backwater of the NHS, a place where old folks go to wither away and where the staff also look as though they have seen their best years. From this unremarkable setting, the three writer-actors - Jo Brand, Vicki Pepperdine and Joanna Scanlan - have created a gem of a comedy. They never overplay their hand, generally stay one step ahead and know that while a note of pathos is fine it still has to be funny. In this second episode, sister Den and nurse Kim have an abusive patient to deal with.

Getting On: Joanna Scanlan ponders playing Nurse

Joanna Scanlan - who you may recognise as The Thick of It's long-suffering Terri, stars as Sister Den Flixter in BBC Four's new comic drama Getting On, which she co-wrote. Den is a nurse, a role that Joanna has some familiarity with, as she explains.

Set in a geriatric ward, naturalistically performed and filmed in a spartan, documentary style, Getting On might not sound the most inviting of comedies. Do not be misled.

Written by and starring Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine, Getting On is a gem of a show that somehow succeeds in being by turns cynical, compassionate, depressing and life-affirming. And funny. Did I mention funny?

Getting on: another reason to adore Jo Brand

What I particularly liked is that the humour has a purpose that isn't simply the sound of its own cackling. It's potentially as good and barbed as The Thick of It.

The BBC has launched its Grey Expectations season, dedicated, as they mistily phrase it, to "the twilight years". Eighty-seven-year-old Liz Smith goes on a cruise. George Melly and John Mortimer are resurrected. And, keeping the theme alive, if that is the word, Susie Dent explains in Radio Times the meaning of the phrase "to kick the bucket". (Do not read this if you are fond of pigs.) Comfort yourself with the thought that you have the last laugh. You don't have to pay a TV licence.

The season started with Getting On (BBC4), a comedy set in a geriatric ward, which happily proved excellent. It is shot in documentary style by Peter Capaldi. All colour is leached out of the ward except a haze of institutional blue. Voices, almost ad libbing, overlap.

The patients seem set, with some spirit, on dying despite the apathetic efforts of the staff. These are Nurse Kim Wilde (Jo Brand), the lowest form of life on the ward after the lino, Sister Flixter (Joanna Scanlan), drowning in paperwork, and Dr Pippa Moore (Vicki Pepperdine), a masterpiece of tinny insincerity. Dr Moore's real passion in life is her collection of faeces ("There is a faecal deposit on that chair." "I'm on top of that"). These three wrote the script ensuring a fair supply of jokes per person. Matron is a martinet of the old school, except he is a man. And horse sense is in inverse ratio to seniority.

The first patient out of the trap is Lily, who dies on her 87th birthday as Sister Flixter is holding her hand and chuckling over her mobile. She leaves behind a large coffee cake baked by her sister, Connie. "Do you think she really wants to have her dead sister's cake back?" asks Nurse Wilde, slavering slightly. "Oh, I'm sure she does. She'll enjoy that with a cup of tea later," says Sister Flixter, fairly firmly. Connie, however, proves elusive, and they are polishing off the cake themselves when a pale, defeated face appears in the glass of the door. A Connie if ever I saw one. Sister Flixter breaks the sad news through a hail of cake crumbs, and Nurse Wilde offers a glass of water, hiding her own slice of cake behind the door jamb. It is what Lily would have wanted. Probably.

It turns out that the old Asian lady, chattering incessantly, is saying, "I want to die. Please kill me", and the nicely spoken lady with terminal MS is looking forward to a holiday in Zurich. "Oh, that's a lovely city. You'll enjoy yourself there," said Dr Moore with shining insincerity - before doing a double take and making a panic-stricken call to Dignitas.

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