Loss leaders

• Text settings

  Text size

  • Small
  • Medium
  • Large

  Line Spacing

  • Compact
  • Normal
  • Spacious
• Comments
• Share

  Share

  Simon Hoggart

  Loss leaders

  Copy link

  • Linkedin
  • Messenger
  • Email

Already a subscriber? Log in

This article is for subscribers only

Subscribe today to get 3 months' delivery of the magazine, as well as online and app access, for only £3.

• Weekly delivery of the magazine
• Unlimited access to our website and app
• Enjoy Spectator newsletters and podcasts
• Explore our online archive, going back to 1828

Most popular

Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

One of the very best programmes in this mould is the new sitcom, or sit-traj, Getting On (BBC4, Wednesday), which is about a bunch of failures running a failed NHS geriatric ward. You wouldn’t think there were many chuckles in the subject, and indeed where there are the laughter tends to die on your lips. The nurses are going through the pitiful belongings of a woman who has just died on her 87th birthday. Though she has her own teeth, they find a set of dentures in her drawer.

‘I think she’s kept her husband’s teeth.’

‘It’s a nice souvenir, isn’t it?’

‘You could keep it on a pendant.’

The programme is directed by Peter Capaldi, who appeared in The Thick Of It, and it uses the same faux-documentary technique. It was only the presence of Jo Brand, who co-wrote it with the two other principal actresses, that forced you to realise that it was fictional. The first episode turned on the discovery of a turd on a chair which calls forth various PC reactions: ‘Don’t call it shit, it’s faeces.’ Brand’s slatternly character is caught between two contrary forces of NHS bureaucracy — the doctor who needs to keep the turd for research purposes, and the male matron who wants it disposed of immediately. ‘Does Mrs A live here?’ he asks, and on being told there’s no Mrs A on the ward, snaps, ‘MRSA!’ Brand and her colleague may be vague and inept — the hopeless tending the helpless — but in their own sloppy way they care for the patients, whereas the bureaucrats who are grinding them down care only for their targets.

The episode ended with the nurses trying to hide from the dead woman’s sister the fact that they are eating the birthday cake she had baked. Funny, of course. Heart-stoppingly sad, too. I’m pretty sure Getting On will make it to terrestrial television, because it is very good, painfully well observed, and because it’s about failure.