Praying or preying on?

St Jimmy's ITV1

I was joking recently with a friend who is about to go into hospital ("tell them you won't accept artificial respiration - you're a private patient and you want real respiration") when his mood suddenly darkened.

His bedridden mother had spent her final months in hospital, he told me, and he'd been appalled by the lackadaisical treatment she'd had to endure, ranging from uncaring GPs and indolent social services to idle and negligent staff on the ward.

Even though she had once been a matron in that very hospital, she'd been continually ignored and neglected, on one occasion left lying on a bedpan for an hour, and on another (when she'd called out to a passing nurse, hoping to be moved to a more comfortable position) greeted with a look of pure venom and the sarcastic hate-filled response "What do you want now?"

So disgusted was he by the behaviour of those paid to look after her that he'd coined "c**tocracy", a word to describe people who choose to spread misery wherever they go, when (if they chose, and for much less effort) they could just as easily make everyone's life a little better instead.

Like sick building syndrome, c**tocracy affects some establishments but not others, and St James's University Hospital in Leeds had always struck me as being refreshingly c**tocrat-free.

Between 1987 and 1996, the fly-on-the-wall Yorkshire TV series Jimmy's gave us a hearteningly upbeat picture of life in one of Europe's biggest hospitals, but I realise now that it never revealed the existence of a parasitical growth that infested the corridors, known as the Creeping Jesi.

Now revived as St Jimmy's (ITV1), and broadcast at the God-forsaken hour of 10:30am on Sundays, this new series concentrates on the chaplains, who do good business by offering their peculiar brand of irrational jollity to the sick and vulnerable, purveying superstition in a building otherwise devoted to science.

Well, it's only in times of despair that most people will weaken sufficiently (in a Brideshead Revisited sort of way) to consider allowing God into their lives; but then again, they'd probably consider allowing Satan, too, if asked nicely, because when you're staring death in the face, it's surely no time to be making enemies.

Having watched the Creeping Jesi in action yesterday, I think St James ought by rights to be the patron saint of the patronising. "We don't influence cure," admitted one chaplain, and as this representative of the only profession in the hospital that has no practical function recited a few lines by the bedside of one sick woman, it was hard to tell if he was praying for her or preying on her.

THE woman in question was the admirably stoical but undeniably jaundiced Lynn, who seemed to be suffering from a variant of the same illness that has tragically turned Robert Kilroy Silk bright orange, and urgently needed a new liver "so I can be pink again instead of yellow".

So could the chaplain do anything useful for her? "We'd like to claim healings," he told us, but then (presumably remembering that God might be listening) added sadly, "but we can't." So we'll take that as a "no" then.