Getting On

Getting On gets better. Somehow Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine have created a comedy about a modern NHS ward that is piercingly weird, coldly plausible, heartbreaking and hilarious. This week, a foul-mouthed racist OAP went on the rampage, delivering a bloody nose to the new male matron, who desperately tried to remember his stay-calm management training module as his nose bled.

The humour in Getting On is stealthy: the harassed doctor searched for her stool samples, hustled pathetically for a car-parking space and saw not that many patients - then looked at her lined face in the toilet and wondered where the years had gone. This moving reverie was interrupted by the head nurse rapping on the door, insisting that it should never be locked. The doctor she fancied, played by The Thick of It's Peter Capaldi (who also directs Getting On), looked past her at a much younger model. The comedy in Getting On is as wincing as The Thick of It, with the added pathos of near-death patients wheezing their last. Or not, as happened this week, with the sudden, vexing recovery of one.

TV Review: Getting On

In the beginning I thought it was trying to hard to be quirky and sardonic, but as the episode wore on and settled down, it was a real treat to watch.

Ward B4 is a backwater of the NHS, a place where old folks go to wither away and where the staff also look as though they have seen their best years. From this unremarkable setting, the three writer-actors - Jo Brand, Vicki Pepperdine and Joanna Scanlan - have created a gem of a comedy. They never overplay their hand, generally stay one step ahead and know that while a note of pathos is fine it still has to be funny. In this second episode, sister Den and nurse Kim have an abusive patient to deal with.