Through an accident of scheduling by the accident-prone Peter Salmon, BBC1 has managed to throw into the dog days of summer two drama series made by BBC Scotland and Wales. This is unfortunate, since you can tell how hard each has tried to make something acceptable to the English. Set in Glasgow, Life Support (Monday, 9.30pm), for instance, has Richard Wilson as its heroine's father, there being no more beloved Scotsman than Victor Meldrew. The Cardiff-based Jack of Hearts (Wednesday, 9.30pm), meanwhile, has the famously Welsh Ruth Madoc, from Hi-de-Hi!, as its heroine's mother and throws in Bonnie Tyler to sing its theme song. And all credit to the regions - or is that now the countries? - for attempting variations on the only two types of contemporary drama the BBC is apparently allowed to make under its royal charter, the cop show and the doc op.
Life Support, now in its third week, is the weaker of the two, asking us to accept that an inner-city NHS hospital has employed a full time "ethicist". You can see this is a useful short cut to Heart of the Matter territory for the deviser, Ashley Pharoah, but it's a felicity that is unearned, for moral conflicts should arise naturally out of drama, not be its subject. The first episode opened with a debate on the mighty ethical dilemma of whether hospitals need ethical dilemmas, which segued naturally into a debate on the one medical quandary we are all up to speed on: euthanasia. Blow me down if a practical example of this did not arrive on a stretcher minutes later in the same episode, when a nurse took it upon herself to inject a lethal dose of plot-propellant into her suicidal, brain-damaged, quadriplegic boyfriend.
Week two served up the treat/don't treat debate in the form of an 11-year-old leukaemia sufferer. In a breakthrough, this week's episode actually discovered different problems to challenge our ethicist, Katherine Doone, but they didn't count for much since the main story had arched back to the trial of Nurse Death. The clearest evidence that any drama series is on life support itself is when it throws in a court-room scene, especially when one of the lawyers is the heroine's dad.
Against the clunk of these storylines, the writers do their best to make their dialogue heard. Pharoah's solution is double doses of swearing all round. Katherine, I must report, used "fucking" adjectivally in episode two. A typical Katherine contribution to philosophical inquiry (one that admittedly would not sound out of place on The Moral Maze) is: "Don't patronise me or I'll rip your bollocks off." (She's a redhead, you know.) I thought I detected an improvement this week, with the arrival of Matthew Hall as scriptwriter. "You are the medical equivalent of sideburns and a safari suit," he had Katherine tell Art Malik's brusque Dr Kamran rather neatly.
The trouble for Aisling O'Sullivan, as Katherine, is that Katherine clearly has no aptitude for ethics. Beyond a vague William Hague-like belief in listening, her only answer is that "there are no easy answers". Half of Life Support's viewers would surely agree with Kamran that she should be sacked. The other half, being male, while perhaps agreeing in theory that Katherine is no more than "useless decoration", would argue the reverse. O'Sullivan has an extremely therapeutic face.
That is more than can be said for Keith Allen's Jack of Hearts, which claims to be the first ever drama series about a probation officer. This really isn't a bad idea for a series, and Jack of Hearts may yet inspire imitators (sadly, I can't see the day when I am going to complain about the advent of yet another tired old ethicist drama). There are signs of intelligent writing by Sian Orrells here - three scenes this week were set on bridges, which must have some kind of symbolic import - and I enjoyed her jokey take on the average criminal IQ. But while Jack of Hearts hopes it is "hard-nosed" and "gritty", it is undone by its glossy direction, part of its executive producer's feverish efforts to make Cardiff appear "the vibrant, modern and cosmopolitan city it is". Its other Achilles heel is its lack of humour: given that Andrew Sachs as well as Allen and Madoc are regulars, they are at liberty to take this criticism as praise for their acting skills.
The only real pull that Life and Jack exert, however, is as soap opera. Who will Katherine get off with? Her wimpish ex, the clean-cut young English doctor, or wicked Dr Kamran? Will a love triangle develop between Jack, his girlfriend Suzanne (Anna Mountford) and her old boyfriend Joe (Steve Toussaint), one of those good-looking black guys for whom, I can tell right now, race is just not going to be an "issue"? Both shows are better than Hope and Glory, but then what isn't? Next to The Sopranos, ER or NYPD Blue, they are so sluggish and obvious that they seem almost products of a different medium.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
