A sitcom that's DOA

Terminally ill but still want to leave 'em laughing when you go? Then why not make your burial arrangements with Vic's Stiffs, and put the fun back into funerals? Our full service includes a hearse with a range of macabre bumper stickers ("Just perished" and "See? - I told you I was ill" are current favourites), driven by a chauffeur attired as the Grim Reaper.

To entertain mourners during the service, a funeral director will halt the interment of the body by saying loudly to the next-of-kin, "Your credit card was refused ... if the bill isn't settled by tomorrow, up he comes." Furthermore, in keeping with recent Home Office proposals to allow multi-layered graveyards, we can now arrange things so that you'll eventually spend the afterlife enjoying a perpetual threesome, on top of Kylie Minogue and underneath Madonna. Admittedly, this would be a posthumous delight, but at least you'll be able to boast to your friends (via a Ouija board) about the timeless pleasures of being eternally stiff.

Last night's episode of Doctors and Nurses (BBC1) was positively riddled with tasteless jokes about death and bereavement, yet it was, paradoxically, the sitcom itself that seemed to be truly terminal. Despite being written "by two people who are angry and passionate about the NHS", the interior of the fictional St Anne's hospital on the factual Isle of Wight bore about as much relation to the real medical world as the Vicar of Dibley does to the C of E.

The resulting action was neither remotely funny, nor remotely believable. Last time I checked, this was the 21st century, but the male staff we saw had stepped straight out of Doctor in the House circa 1969, while the females seemed to be auditioning for Carry On Nurse. The general intellectual level was reminiscent-of Only When I Laugh, and the Toys-R-We ooh-arring lower orders appeared to be there on a day-trip from Mummersetshire.

All in all, if laughter is the best medicine, then I fear that the cast, crew and audience alike will all have been wiped out long before the end of the series.

The main problem lay with the writing, because this wasn't an organic script, just a collection of feeble medical student rag-mag jokes, stuck together with scant regard for character or dramatic necessity. Doctors inexplicably attempted to amuse each other with the sort of SIG (Stroppy Ignorant Git) acronyms that GPs allegedly scrawl onto patients' notes (even though, being medics, they would already know them), while nurses sniggeringly referred to surgeons as "Doctor Ten Thumbs", or resorted to that most desperate of comedic devices, the uninspired simile - "He's got as much self-control as Angus Deayton in a brothel."

Little old WRVS ladies tried to raise a laugh by swearing like navvies (a device that only ever works in homeopathic doses, as in MTV's spectacular promotional ads), while Adrian Edmondson played the role of Dr Roy Glover in a most unusual way for him, by scarcely ever shouting. Trouble is, when Mr Edmondson isn't shouting, he isn't acting, which suggests that, deep down, he isn't really an actor at all. Just a man in a white coat, talking.

What did ring true in last night's episode was the hypocrisy of the medical profession's attitude towards tobacco, continually lambasting their patients for sucking on an occasional face tube yet surreptitiously chain-smoking themselves. When Dr Glover banned smoking in St Anne's, he soon found that staff (including himself) became snappy and irascible - he'd surely have done far better simply to let nicotine and nature take their inevitable course, then collect the tar from the lungs of all the freshly deceased smokers until he had enough to resurface the hospital car park (thus saving on his NHS budget).

But what didn't ring true at all was the comedy killing of an elderly patient by injecting him with a heart relaxant in a Shipmanesque manner, followed by his comedy resurrection, just as the next-of-kin were being comedically informed of their father's demise. At this point, I felt that someone should have taken the entire cast into a quiet room and told them, "Please sit down. I have some bad news. I'm afraid your series is brain dead. I'm sorry. We did all we could, but now the time has come to unplug it."

Okay, my diagnosis is bleak, but what other conclusions could I come to when the closing credits revealed that the executive producer was Jonathan Powell, aka Doctor Death, the genius who gave us Eldorado?