It’s not an obvious source for laughs – the office of a council children’s services department, which is where Jo Brand’s Damned (Channel 4) is set. But then nor was the hospital ward that was the setting for her wonderful sitcom Getting On. Brand, who again co-wrote and stars, looks beyond the obvious, to difficult places where the only way the underpaid and underthanked people who work there can get by is to employ black humour.
Actually, this first episode of Damned (as in, if you do and if you don’t) is more about the place of work than the work that goes on there. Weird Martin has changed the code for the door, so just getting into the office is hard today. Denise the dictatorial boss is tasked with creating a streamlined cluster team (I think she means making cuts) and employs sneaky former-cop Nitin – known, borderline racistly, as Night In – to spy on his colleagues. Nat the temp who can’t work the phones is back, and still can’t work them. Rose and Al (Brand and Alan Davies) are on aforementioned black humour and banter. Ingrid is about to have a hysterectomy, her mind’s not really on the job. The camera operator has a chronic case of the shakes and zoomy-in-and-outy syndrome – I’m feeling quite dizzy.
It – the office, the boss, the bants, the wobbly camera – is not unfamiliar. There are a few voicemails from people wanting help, but not an awful lot of helping children. Ah, here’s someone, Anne-Marie, but her case was closed a while back, she’s now just here to stalk Al. Eventually, Rose goes out to visit some children who may need help, and who are in the (poor) care of an ex of hers, as it happens.
I could have done with more of that – more of the social work, less of the office japes and politics, which has been pretty much covered (yes, I am thinking of a certain office in Slough). Social work is clearly something that Brand cares about and knows about (her mother was a social worker); it suits her style – sort of celebratory and respectful, but in a mucky way. I hope in the coming episodes it will probe deeper, unearth darker secrets, and make Damned the genuinely original thing that Getting On was. And maybe social work will prove to be a great unfracked reserve of tragi-comedy shale gas.
I don’t think the paramedics and crews in observational doc Ambulance (BBC1) – which follows members of the London ambulance service as they try to keep 8.6 million Londoners alive – go underappreciated. They’re heroes and, if some of them seem to know it, well, that’s probably allowed. Hell, it looks hard though, what they do: a cardiac arrest here, a shooting over there, suicide, stabbing, more stopped hearts, a big fire. And then maybe a big spike in demand – surge purple enhanced, it’s called – which means someone has to make tricky decisions about who gets an ambulance and who doesn’t. If you’re told you don’t require one, it might just mean there simply isn’t an ambulance available.
Not that everyone who calls 999 does need one, of course, and there are some nice examples of serious pisstakers here. Like the lady who calls with a broken nail. And a call about a dead cat – dead and buried, so it’s unclear why the caller thinks it needs an ambulance. And another call from the Queen of England. Actually, I think it probably was the Queen of England and they might have been a bit quick to dismiss that one. She could be lying on the floor somewhere, staring up at the ceiling, hoping to see a blue flash reflected in chandelier or gilding.
Incidentally, I wonder if her son and heir was watching Fishing Impossible (ITV). Why? Because these three clowns – Charlie, Jason and Blowfish – are on a ship off the Falkland Islands trying to catch a Patagonian toothfish. Don’t you remember, from the Black Spider Letters? It was about the most interesting revelation from them. Charles loves those Patagonian toothfish like he loves his own brothers, and he doesn’t want them eaten, however delicious they are. Especially not by someone called Blowfish (I wonder if he actually does; I remember Paul Merton tossing off a salmon on the telly once).
Oh, it doesn’t really matter, because neither Blowfish, nor Charlie nor Jason, catches even one single toothfish. It’s a whole show, about not catching a fish.
