Getting On

Interview: Jo Brand on Getting On

The creator-star of the BBC Four hospital sitcom on Peter Capaldi, comedy and the cuts.

TV preview: Getting On

Now in its third series, this unvarnished gem has always presented a humane and despairing portrait of the beleaguered NHS. But now, more than ever, it feels like a helpless eulogy for an institution trudging towards its final days.

BBC Four's Getting On strikes the funny bone

BBC Four's new hospital comedy Getting On is the first comedy in decades that has got us cackling at the NHS.

Jo Brand won't be in US version of Getting On

Jo Brand is happy for her Getting On co-stars to appear in the US version of the show - but she won't be joining them.

The second series of the sitcom set in an NHS geriatric ward opened up even darker, richer seams of black comedy than the first. Written by and starring Jo Brand (world-weary Nurse Kim Wilde), Vicki Pepperdine (tactless Dr Pippa Moore) and Joanna Scanlan (Sister Den Flixter), it was directed by The Thick of It's Peter Capaldi - and the influence of the political comedy was evident in every frame. The posturings of hierarchy and bureaucratic idiocy were skewered relentlessly, scatological humour was allied to brutal deadpan, and the timing was perfect. Getting On also hid a beating heart at its centre that gave it surprising emotional power.

Getting On: my triumvirate of heroines

Jo Brand, Vicki Pepperdine and Jo Scanlan have gifted us a TV classic with their touchingly comic window on the NHS.

It may have escaped your notice, but the current series of one of 2010's best comedies quietly came to an end last night. Set in a careworn NHS geriatric ward, Getting On has drawn critical acclaim, but negligible viewing figures.

While I appreciate that a rawly naturalistic tragicomedy suffused with the stench of sickness and mortality will never be a ratings blockbuster, it would be nice to see more love for this overlooked gem.

Written by and starring Joanna Scanlan, Vicki Pepperdine and former psychiatric nurse Jo Brand, Getting On is the antithesis of your average mainstream medical confection: a defiantly unglamorous depiction of Britain's healthcare system, staffed not by selfless angels, but by flawed human beings muddling through as best they can under thankless circumstances. Skating deftly on a hairpin between comedy and pathos, it depicts a profession in which the abiding concerns are bureaucracy, people management and death.

This was never more strikingly illustrated than in the scenes in which the elderly Scottish woman who had been slowly dying throughout the series, finally, inevitably expired. Her poor daughter, unable to accept what had happened, tearfully and tetchily instructed her to wake up, as if it was all just a sick joke: a heartbreaking sketch of grief, emblematic of the programme's understatement.

Sister Den (Scanlan) and Nurse Kim (Brand) went through the practiced motions of comforting the bereaved and dealing with the deceased. But they also argued over what to do with the dead woman's untouched lunch.

Keen to vacate another much-needed bed, Den told the bewildered daughter that the body had to be moved immediately. She was bundled from the hospital to deal with her pain elsewhere, while her mother was abruptly wheeled away in full view of the other patients. As a blunt, desperately sad illustration of Getting On's core themes of life's cyclical grind and the pragmatic demands of NHS medical care, it couldn't have been bettered.

Director Peter Capaldi - Scanlan's co-star from The Thick of It, of which this is a spiritual relative - is to be commended for his sensitive handling of this material. His appropriately sickly, washed-out colour palette and the authentic performances from his excellent cast combine to create a bleakly enthralling atmosphere unlike any other British sitcom.

Doesn't sound like a laugh riot? Well no, it isn't, but nor is it trying to be. The humour arises naturally from character, the situations rooted in reality. Getting On is poignant, funny, profound even. Here's hoping for a speedy return.

Bleak gallows humour provided the painful laughs in Getting On. This extended run hasn't quite matched the quality of the first three-part outing but it will be sad if this is the last we see of Nurse Kim Wilde, Sister Den Flixter and Dr Pippa Moore. This trio have burrowed their way into my black heart.

In a season finale so low key it scarcely shivered in the lock, the story wearily juggled Den's bid to win a nurse-of-the-year contest by fixing up a dream trip for a patient ('She hasn't got a terminal illness, Den.' 'We don't know that, Kim.') with monstrous Matron Hilary Loftus announcing yet another sexuality U-turn.

It's all too grubby and real, best watched with antiseptic handwash. I can't wait for it to come back.