Television
The temporary John Thaw vehicle, Plastic Man (ITV, Wednesday), was darker than it knew and less clever than it thought, which meant it just about evened out at television's current expectations for mainstream drama. Joe, a long-married plastic surgeon (Thaw), falls in love with Louise, an attractive clinical psychologist (Frances Barber). In their jobs, they sensitively patch up lost souls, specifically Claire, a mastectomy victim, and Liam, a young dosser with a birthmark larger than the Sea of Tranquillity. In their private lives, they do harm clumsily.
This paradox did not prove strong enough to support the portentous cliches hung on it by the writer, Robin Mukherjee. And leaden cliches they were. Joe was 20 years older than his mistress. Louise was a liberated modern woman - although some of her attitudes made her sound nearer 20 than 40: boasting, for instance, of a sexual score card that rated ten for a consultant, five for a medical student and "minus three" for a vibrator (vibrators are big in drama these days: will next year's male leads boast to general approval of using inflatable women?). As usual, wifey back home (Sorcha Cusack) was a professional underachiever whose domestic accomplishments ran to operating two varieties of coffee-maker. As usual, there was a black character (Shaun Parkes), who was a saint.
Even the depths were shallow. Joe was a practising Catholic, which allowed a confessional scene and an awkward U-turn on his way to the communion table, but was mainly of visual value as an alternative to the gleam of the hospital and domestic clutter of his home. Running with this, the director Sarah Pia Anderson decreed that the funeral of Joe's son took place in a vast cemetery in slashing rain amid an outbreak of black umbrellas - more a Mafia send-off than a Middle England one. Liam, meanwhile, clutched a notebook of poetry and art which Joe and Louise regarded on scant evidence as of near Blakean worth.
"Liam," Joe nevertheless presumed to lecture him near the end, "I can tell you something about life - an ordinary, four-walls-and-a-roof, cat-food-in-the-fridge kind of life. It's maybe something nobody ever told you before, but you should know this before you make any decisions. It is not that great and a lot of the time it is shit, quite frankly." This was a coincidence because people had been suggesting life was shit for the previous three hours and frequently saying so in as many words. Liam was called "a rotten piece of ugly shit" by a bunch of yuppies and then decided he wanted to be "shit" because it was "the only free thing in this world". Joe, his wife said, was a "little shit of a man". Shovelled on in this way, Mukherjee's coprolalia was not only inarticulate but a downer.
At least, however, Plastic Man was an attempt to dramatise contemporary Britain. It grasped the interdependency of the social classes, from the medical professionals, to the commercial middles (represented by Claire and her husband in the underwritten mastectomy sub-plot), to Liam and his underclass. This compliment, of connecting with real life, can be repeated with more rather enthusiasm in respect of Psychos (Channel 4, Thursdays), a drama serial about life in a Glasgow psychiatric unit.
Whereas Joe's hospital gleamed chrome and blue, Muirpark Hospital is so authentically NHS that you can smell the boiled cabbage and disinfectant. The series is immersed in the detail of hospital procedure and medical technique, detail the staff are only half interested in. All this is convincing. The problem comes with patients: a nympho; a man who thinks he is the rightful king of England; two reincarnations of Jesus Christ - in other words, too many comic turns all round.
What you do get is a fascinating central character in the antic Dr Daniel Nash, a frizzy-haired rebel who overuses "bastard" as an adjective, resents authority and prefers to give his patients a good talking to rather than pills. Maverick docs are nothing new but this one's hunches are wrong as often as they are right. In episode one he may have recognised that the supposed paranoid really had reason to fear for his life, but in episode two he mistakenly believed a suicidal man could be rescued by tender loving football.
What makes Nash interesting, however, is the lithium tremble of his hands. Played enthusiastically by Douglas Henshall, who must have studied from a lively textbook on bipolar depression, Nash prefers cognitive to drug therapy because he is heavily medicated himself. This week he stopped taking "the bastard lithium" and went spectacularly mad. Nash acts out the entire doctor v patient, creativity v conformism tension of the show - which is just as well, since its 37-minute length barely grants space for anybody else to. Half-achieved though it is, Psychos is evidence that drama on Channel 4 is responding to Michael Jackson's medication. It is a little grittier, a touch more daring, already unlike anything you see elsewhere.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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