Hospital DJ Ivan Brackenbury – “the cheerful earful” – is all in a muddle with his jingles, keeps putting the wrong one on. So he plays Friday’s on a Thursday, then has to go through the whole week to get back to the right place, all live on air, of course.
Meanwhile Brimlington hospital manager Susan Mitchell, who bounces ideas off her interns as she strides purposefully along corridors, is talking a lot of management guff. Ian D Montford is a hospital porter, but not just a hospital porter, he’s also a psychic healer. Father Kenny Mercer is the chaplain, also a wannabe standup and a Scouser with a red convertible sports car. Terry is a “repeat patient” (moaning hypochondriac).
They’re all characters in mock-doc Hospital People (BBC1), part of the long-running and recently rekindled Comedy Playhouse sitcom strand. And they’re good characters – polychromatic, nicely observed and performed by Tom Binns. Yes, as well as co-writing Hospital People (with Matt Morgan), comedian Binns shows off his range by playing all of the above.
Some – like DJ Ivan Brackenbury, who has a touch of the Jimmy Saviles about him – have been part of Binns’s standup repertoire. So has my favourite, Ian D Montford, the psychic healer. “And you’re going to trust a surgeon to do that?” he asks a patient as he wheels him to get a lump removed from his lung. “Do you know the body can heal itself if you only allow it to?”
Nice lines too, then. I also like Father Mercer’s assistant Mrs Leydon imagining she’s Mary Magdalene anointing the feet of Jesus Christ when she waxes the chrome wheels of the chaplain’s Audi TT. And DJ Ivan congratulating a listener for being in bed with the mysterious Mrs A, when actually the poor chap is laid up with MRSA.
It’s all fairly gentle, though. I’m appreciating, chuckling a little, rather than rolling about on the floor. It’s not bold or surprising – and I wonder if, 15 years on from The Office, the workplace mockumentary has had its day?
Does anyone else wonder about these docs being mocked, which interview non-essential people in ordinary workplaces? What are they? No? Just me then.
