Hospital (BBC2) | iPlayer
Theresa vs Boris: How May Became PM (BBC2) | iPlayer
Who Should We Let In? (BBC2) | iPlayer
The Crystal Maze (C4) | All 4
Watch of the week, undoubtedly, was a simply superb start to the second series of the fly-on-the-wall Hospital, in which cameras, handled with courtesy, generally get to peer at the entrails of St Mary’s hospital, Paddington, west London, and the weary travails within its groaning walls. Those courteous cameras, and the producers behind them, were rewarded by being allowed to keep filming throughout Wednesday 22 March – the day a jihadist nutter mowed through the crowds on Westminster Bridge before stabbing a policeman – rather than haughtily told to pack up. It was an eminently sensible, if risky, call by the St Mary’s high-ups, and utterly vindicated. I suggest, if you haven’t seen this, you catch up as soon as humanly possible: you might not appreciate being invited to put yourselves through it, but nor did the crowds on the bridge.
It wasn’t long, his spree – 82 seconds – but five dead, dozens injured, lives altered unutterably, and we saw the fallout land fast at A & E’s resuscitation unit. There had been some behind-the-scenes frantic stuff just to clear out enough ICU beds, the few movable patients being wheeled out the back in tarpaulins with unseemly haste for the main event: sterling work by all, though dare I say a little too much self-importance from one or two middle-managers, rather keen to don tabards vouchsafing them as Bronze or Gold Team or whatever and bark into phones, before remembering that they were very much the warm-up act, and bean-counters at that.
Stars of the show, apart of course (as ever) from the quietly spoken, quietly knackered surgeons, were 18-year-old Yann and Victor, 16, two French students, best pals. Yann’s brain was, essentially, hanging out; Victor’s lung had collapsed: but after only about an hour or so of bloodied wizardry and mask-muttered talk – “can I get a curette… no, not a bone-nibbler!”, and terrifying stuff about a “tibial nail” – both were stabilised, and soon reunited. Young Victor in particular was wise beyond his years, and had a grand line in dry French humour – he had enjoyed some “excellent” days in London, “even if the end… didn’t exactly go to plan”. Earlier, however, we’d seen him on the phone to his parents. “Will you come?” Just a scared laddie wanting his maman.
It was occasionally easy to forget we were not watching a drama, but visceral life itself. We were soon reminded by lovely Stephen, who only kept his leg thanks to some near-incredible micro-surgery. Days later he would walk out, with a tentative, “I think I’m allowed to say we’ve won. We survived, and we’re safe.” The “we” here referred to wife Cara, who during newspaper coverage had been photographed bending beseechingly over Stephen on the bridge. “I just see love in it, really,” he said. “All the chaos and hatred, and all I can see is my wife looking after me.”
What struck, too, was the immense pastoral care meted out by St Mary’s, from simply reuniting a boy with his glasses, to sympathetic translators, or surgeons eating into their valuable time to warn, patiently, of flashbacks, or a doc snapping – most politely, but it was an unmistakable snap – on the phone at a French insurance company.
I’m not going to blah on about our “people” being united more than divided, or London being stronger afterwards, because I’m not even sure if I would believe my own platitudes any more, but I suspect everyone could take their little redemptive lesson from this programme. Apart, of course, from the nutters.
Didn’t Boris get a relatively easy ride in Theresa vs Boris: How May Became PM, a not entirely unsuccessful imagined dramatising of last year’s Tory leadership election? Theresa was played as a whey-faced, stiff-gaited automaton, and Michael Gove as a whey-faced, stiff-gaited automaton with an unconvincing Scottish brogue, and Boris as a clubbable, bumbling, curry-loving funster. In reality, of course, he’s possibly the most culpable of the lot, having down the years “served” his country in much the same way a stallion serves a mare, and I can only reluctantly marvel, with weary migraines, at the fact his team is still spinning him so successfully.
What also came across, though, was how truly, rambunctiously, hog-whimperingly incompetent were all the special advisers. The lies, the foot-shootery, the whispers, the disorganisation, the lies – one whiff of promised power would seem to turn Oxbridge’s finest into stumbling, duplicitous thudmonkeys who couldn’t find their own arse with both hands and a map. This was all helpfully supplemented with interviews with real-life Tory MPs from the varying camps, who cheerfully surmised “There is nothing more Machiavellian than a Tory leadership contest”, and “[the parliamentary Tories] are the most dishonest electorate in history: what reason do they have to be honest?”
With this mix in place, and the ongoing Brexit shambles – Brambles? – and the Queen’s speech throwing up only one question – did a whole two goats die in vain? – what fresh joys surely await us in the autumn.
Ian Hislop turned his ever-gimlet brain on to the fraught subject of immigration, in Who Should We Let In?, but it turns out that it was hardly fraught at all in Victorian times: our forebears saw it as a badge of honour, and a moral duty, to throw our doors open ever wider.
Hislop precised forensically, with the help of some fun graphics, how that all changed. There are the numbers, of course – 0.3% of Brits were foreign-born in 1851, 13.5% in 2015 – but there was also post-first world war resentment at undercutting of wages, and some savage muddying of the waters between “asylum seeker” and “immigrant” by, among others, Sir William Evans-Gordon and his British Brothers’ League against “foreign pauper aliens”. Ian had an interview with their spiritual descendant, Katie Hopkins, and gave as good as he got. But he certainly got some.
“It’s because of people like you that there are people like me,” said Katie, who came across as more intelligent than her writing could ever suggest. “You, the liberal elite, you are Dr Frankenstein, and I am your monster.”
The Crystal Maze – hurrah! – returned, with the same music, similar sets, magically reborn, and a new host, the splendid Richard Ayoade, nicely channelling Richard O’Brien’s mania while bringing his own slacker charm to proceedings, and four relatively endearing “celebrity” contestants, competing in this opener for charidee. And Louie Spence.
Dear God. How I cheered when this simpering, whimpering little prancing gonk of a man was locked in the cage of a game he’d (stupidly) lost in the Aztec Zone. How I wanted to eat my own ears when team cap’n Alex Brooker “bought” him out with a crystal. I thought, briefly, about his being locked in that cage, and my having ever to join him, and surmised, no matter how unfairly, that I’d rather be locked in with La Hopkins.
