Greeny News

Hilarious, frank and scalpel sharp, the hospital comedy Getting On is back. Tim Lusher has a checkup with its writer-stars

When the hospital comedy Getting On slipped on to BBC4 last year, there were no wailing sirens or flashing lights to herald that a major drama was about to unfold. Just three hilarious, incisive episodes later, it was all over â€" quietly discharged from the schedules, leaving an almost perceptible stench of soiled sheets, rising bile and ulcerating despair.

Unlike ER and House, Getting On did not trade on medicine's heroic glamour, or lean on its melodramatic aspect, as Casualty or Holby City do. Set on a drab ward somewhere on England's south coast, it instead drew unexpected howls of laughter from the drudgery, frustrations and indignities of life for patients and staff in a typical world-of-beige NHS hospital. One episode revolved around finding out who had pooed on a chair and who was going to clean it up. Not since Jed Mercurio's BodiesTV drama was poked in the dirty business of health with such startling candor.

Lauded by fans and critics, and nominated for writingand acting awards , Getting On is back for a second, longer run of six episodes. Overworked nurse Kim Wilde, played with unblinking stoicism by Jo Brand, is still mired in pus and bureaucracy â€" her first task in the new series is dealing with a tramp's burst perianal abscess. Sister Den Flixter (Joanna Scanlan) is struggling to find beds, meet performance targets and defeat her loneliness through a romance with confused male matron Hilary. Humourless, imperious doctor Pippa Moore's riveting work to expand the Bristol Stool Chart to "an exhaustive 31 types of patient faeces" is less to the fore because she is fighting for her job. Vicki Pepperdine, who plays Moore, sounds suitably relieved. "We didn't want to bang on about poo. We felt we'd done quite a lot of poo jokes."

But there's no change of tone: Getting On remains real, raw and human, scalpel-sharp on the interplay between character and hierarchy. Brand, who writes the series with Scanlan and Pepperdine, said that they are intended as a 'Holby City antidote, where everyone has so much makeup, and they do care for about 20 seconds, and then go and romance with the surgeon ". Familiar and nurses, and she went to the rack, mark snorts at the comparison of its character and Edie Falco 'S Nurse Jackie â€" also lauded as a gritty portrayal of a medical frontliner. "The difference was she had darts in her uniform to give her a glamorous waist."

Medical professionals seem to like drama 'S pessimistic tone . "I get the sense that people are relieved you've sort of shown it how it is," says Brand. "The thing I hear the most is nurses saying, 'It's so like my job.'" Singer Kim Wilde, meanwhile, was apparently delighted when Brand told her about her namesake â€" and may do a cameo if the show gets a third series. "She said, 'Can I come and be in a bed?' We've got in mind to slot her in, in a Hitchcockian way, and not even mention it. She'll be singing Kids in America then we'll tranquilise her."

The three writer-stars are neighbours in south London and have the rapport you'd expect. Scanlan worked on an Annie Griffin comedy, Coming Soon, with Pepperdine, who lives next door to Brand's best friend. They plan plots and rehearse in Scanlan's house ("because it's tidy"), then divvy up the scriptwriting â€" although they improvise during filming. Like magpies, the trio shamelessly collect anecdotes to adapt. Brand recalls: "At a friend's wedding, a very elderly woman came up to me and said, 'I was in hospital next to an old bloke and he just wanked all day long. Can you put that in?'"

Pepperdine's parents both worked in the NHS, her mother as an occupational therapist and father as an administrator. Scanlan has been typecast since a 1997 role as a midwife in Peak Practice. "As a fat actress I have played 15 nurses. I was thinking, 'What is it about the fat that equals nurse?' and it's that it reads as unthreatening and warm." While they insist Getting On's characters could have worked in a different setting (Scanlan cites the HBO buddy show Entourage

Choosing a female-dominated workplace also allowed them to circumvent the odd, irritating scrutiny that falls on "women doing comedy", says Scanlan. "It was that or elderly prostitutes really, wasn't it?" says Brand.

Their trump card in pitching the humour just right, however, may be the influence of director Peter Capaldi, who develops the scripts with producer Geoff Atkinson. Scanlan worked with Capaldi on The Thick of It (she played useless press officer Terri Coverley) and raves about his "classy" approach. ("Roman Polanski wasn't available," drawls Brand.) The two programmes share a deadpan visual and comedic tone. Capaldi, who won a directing Oscar for his 1993 short film, Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life, brings a distinctive aesthetic to Getting On: a faded, mournful palette of grey, green and brown, caught by jumpy handheld cameras that give the feel of reality TV.

But there the shows' similarities end. "The Thick of It is quite cold," says Scanlan. "If there's a feeling they're dealing with, it's mainly anger." "Emotionally, it's got a different colour," agrees Brand. "It's blue and we're red."

Although it has heart, and the topic of funding cuts looms in the storyline, Getting On is not overtly political or campaigning. There's a weary, dogged pride in the world it portrays. "Yes we moan about the NHS but its existence is such a wonderful thing," says Brand. "We feel like it's ours so we can say what we like about it." She regrets how nursing has changed since she left in 1988. "All nurses now have to get degrees and in my humble opinion that removes them slightly from patient care. They want to be practitioners â€" they don't just want to be wiping bums. To me, that's a bad move. The health service has been incredibly bureaucratised as well, so you have to fill in forms all the time rather than just sitting by someone's bed and trying to cheer them up."

Ah, who wouldn't love a hospital visit from Jo Brand? She can reel off terrible things she saw as a nurse â€" the man who came into an emergency clinic at Christmas with all his fingers nailed to a breadboard; trying to hold up a 30st incontinent woman while she was "pebbledashing the room with shit". Yet her humour is intact despite it all â€" probably even boosted. "Ambulance service people, police, all those people who work in highly stressed situations develop really cruel senses of humour," she says.

So how does she feel now about elderly suffering, having made this tender, funny, heartbreaking series? "It makes me think I want someone to put a pillow over my face before I get to that stage. I think in years to come we'll see a relaxing of the rules. At the moment, you've got to go to Switzerland. By the time I get near it, I would much rather you were able to do it over here. I can just see a little Dignitas in Penge."

Getting On starts on BBC4 on October 26.