Getting On

There aren't many comedies that could raise a laugh from an elderly woman who's had an aneurysm trying to recite a phone number without seeming cruel, but Getting On does it with ease. After the histrionics of last week, things return to a more measured level, as Kim attempts to pass on a message to the brother of the woman with the aneurysm, which leads to a delightfully bittersweet ending. That's not to say there aren't still some sparks flying on the ward, again involving Den. This time she flies off the handle when the insufferable Pippa tries to apologise for giving her a "slightly harsh" reference for a flat application. And there's a death on the ward, which is dealt with in a routine, perfunctory manner - the most important question is who gets the yogurts left in the fridge.

Getting On review

Getting On would seem to scotch any lingering prejudice that women are less funny than men. Principals Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicky Pepperdine also wrote the partly ad-libbed show, and bring to life a comedy of the half-resented, half-generous sacrifices of dedication.

Brand plays nursing auxiliary Kim, supervised by Scanlan as Sister Den Flixter; both engage in constant half-cock skirmishes with consultant Pippa Moore (Pepperdine). The show has grasped and exploits a deeper-than-surface reality: that the health service, shorn of a chain of clear command, is a place of overlapping baronies that must bargain with each other for time and resources.

Thus, in last week's episode, Kim has Sister Den assigned to assist her as a moonlighting agency nurse in the middle of the night - and the two struggle over who has the right to give orders.

At the same time, Dr Moore seeks Kim's aid as a witness to an "inappropriate incident" earlier and is stymied because Kim "doesn't like legal things". Where "do it because I say so" is absent, a low-level insubordination, which is also an assertion of dignity, spreads like a fungus - and in that is the comedy.

Getting On just keeps getting better. Well into the second series, and the geriatric ward comedy continues to combine Ken Loach style social realism with laugh out loud funny, without compromising either.

There are times when Getting On is so poignant and melancholy that it seems wrong to laugh, but I always do anyway. It is by far the best comedy on TV at the moment, and frequently the best drama as well. And to think I used to believe Jo Brand couldn't act.

On what should be a dull nightshift, nurse Kim Wilde plays solitaire on the computer. Bliss. Except Kim's hopes of a quiet night prove to be forlorn when, first, she's left alone on the ward because the night sister leaves early, and then B4 welcomes an emergency admission whose condition is unusual enough to attract the attentions of ambitious Dr Moore. If this weren't difficult enough, Kim also has to contend with a tired and emotional Den (teary phone message to Hilary: "Maybe we could try for a baby . . ."). Controlled mayhem, beautifully anchored by deadpan Jo Brand's comic timing.

The first five minutes of tonight's episode pass amid an eerie silence as we follow nurse Kim Wilde trying to fill dead time all alone on the night shift. Soon the monotonous calm is descending into bedlam after the admission of an Italian woman with a medical secret that has Dr Moore salivating at the thought of the fame it could bring her. Meanwhile, in a horrendous scene in the middle of the ward, matron Hilary finally gives vent to the rage and disgust that his chillingly soft-spoken words usually struggle to conceal. Amid all the shouting and emotion, there are some exquisite gags, particularly Kim's misunderstanding of why the Italian woman keeps pleading "piano" while she's being hoisted onto a bed.

Last week's episode was metaphorically dark; this one is literally dark, as nurse Kim (Jo Brand) is on the night shift. Some clever plot twists mean Sister Den and Dr Pippa also manage to find themselves in B4 outside their usual hours: Den proves to be more trouble than she's worth and Pippa believes she's discovered a major medical event, before it collapses spectacularly around her ears. As ever, this contains some flashes of true comic brilliance.

Still potentially in the dock over an inappropriate remark, nurse Kim Wilde (Jo Brand) isn't happy. "I came back to nursing to get away from the kids and it's even shitter here than it is at home," she reckons. You can see her point. When a B4 patient, Peggy Lowe (the excellent Hazel Douglas), has a bath-time accident, everyone seems more interested in avoiding the blame than making an honest appraisal of what went wrong. Elsewhere, an excited Doctor Pippa has momentous news: "My faecal forum presentation text has been translated into 17 languages." Director Peter Capaldi guests as consultant Peter Healy.

Work has started on the new wing and the constant sound of drilling is distressing the bed-bound inhabitants of ward B4, in particular prickly new patient Peggy. The episode starts with a camera drifting serenely through the ward towards a bed and then exploding into a flurry of jumpy, out of focus shots as the slumbering Peggy is woken sharply by the drilling. As a visual metaphor for the state of mind of confused elderly patients it works astonishingly well. Today, plot strands that look as if they'll run across the series are opened up. The situation between Den and Hilary looks as if it will come to a head soon, Kim's continued presence on the ward seems in doubt after she injures a patient, and the supercilious Dr Moore is having trouble with funding.

An extremely fragrant patient was heaved in to B4, where Jo Brand and Joanna Scanlan were discovering that the multi-disciplinary approach to care doesn't really work when beds, trolleys and the rest aren't multi at all. They write the show with Vicki Pepperdine, who steals the acting honours as the useless doctor. Director Peter Capaldi's wobbly camera appears to be mounted on a drip stand with a wheel missing.

Virtue has been rewarded with a return to the schedules for BBC4's dark and unglamorous hospital comedy Getting On, launched last year with three superbly measured episodes of low-key wit and broad hilarity. Who (of the 19 people who saw it) can forget the fun had with the self-important Dr Moore's faecal stool research programme or the eloquently brief wrangling over the ethics of eating a dead woman's birthday cake, or those oases of tedium, ticking with wicked purpose.

The first thing I noticed, though - even as the great Richard Hawley title song lulled us into the new series - was how healthily Daz blue everything looked. Here came the familiar cameras, zooming and retreating in homage to The Thick of It (courtesy of director Peter Capaldi), but where was the bilious washed-out decor and bad complexions and air of neglect? Had the MRSA police been in with the Mr Muscle and a lick of paint? Had someone been ironing the uniforms?

It soon began to ooze some of the old malodorous promise with the arrival of a comatose female of no fixed abode smelling like "an every-orifice cocktail", as dogsbody nurse Kim (mistress of droll, Jo Brand) put it, vying with ward sister Den (Joanna Scanlan) for best evocative observation of human pungency. Something was rotten down there...

There was more laughter to be milked out of it with the entrance of no-nonsense consultant Dr Moore (the excellent Vicki Pepperdine), blind to preposterousness as she urged her retinue of horrified dimwit trainees to peer into the poor woman's back passage and see a valuable learning opportunity. "So... perineal abscess? Rectal prolapse? Anal fistulae?" It was funny, but it did start to dribble away into a dull scene about the new gerontology wing, only to be picked up again by Donald the porter, trying to offload the offending patient on other unwilling departments, his gurney journeying back and forth with diminishing comic power. By the time he parked it in the corridor the only smell I could detect was the new lino.

To be fair there were entertaining skirmishes but they lacked the friction that gave the last series its crackling energy. Den has lost her fear of the officious Dr Moore. Sexually bi-curious matron Hilary - a monster of neuroses held in check by self-help psychobabble - has been stripped of his menace (like Samson before him, I believe) by the blowjob Den gave him in the back of a taxi. And where were the delicious lingual infelicities, the absurdities of NHS jargon, the workplace correctness that left Kim floundering in useless common sense - the whole pickle of moral compromise without which drama can be neither funny nor tragic? Perhaps it will all be back next week. I hope so.