Television Review: Balancing Bitter and Sweet is a Little Tricky

By Andrea Mullaney

Scrubs, E4

London Calling: Inside The BBC World Service, BBC4

COMPARED to most American comedies, Scrubs is diet cola: much less sugary than most, with a refreshingly bitter aftertaste. The young doctors and their mentors at the Sacred Heart Hospital only spend about 15 per cent of their time on hugs and meaningful learning experiences, as opposed to the likes of Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives which usually hit around 85 per cent.

Okay, so Zach Braff’s goofy Dr JD might bond with a Wise Patient and have a Meaningful Moment of Insight into his current situation (having accidentally knocked up his new girlfriend in circumstances revealing a surprising lack of knowledge for a medical professional). But any sappiness is immediately followed by him being spray-painted as the Stars and Stripes by his janitor nemesis and hung from a flagpole.

But as this sixth – and penultimate – season began, the likeable cast are no longer the fresh-faced interns, or “newbies” as the show has it. They’ve had to find new storylines for them, unfortunately resulting in three simultaneous pregnancies among the main characters, which seems like overkill.

And the more bizarre sequences which always used to be presented as dream sequences or fantasies are now portrayed as actually happening. A dodgy opening gag about JD being abducted to Las Vegas by some old gay men, nearly pressed into a civil partnership and joining the Blue Man Group on stage, should really have ended with someone shaking him out of it. That was straining too hard for laughs, but Scrubs still has some moments of surreal fun carried off naturally, like all the hospital staff getting on down in reception to Dr Turk’s groovy N’Sync ringtone.

And Dr Cox’s sarcastic, angry, mean senior physician is a treat, a proto-House without the yucky medical mysteries or Hugh Laurie’s dodgy accent. Occasionally he tries to reform.

“I’m through with anger,” he declared to his equally caustic wife.

“Oh, is this going to be like the time you quit drinking? ‘Cause that was the longest 20 minutes of my life,” she snapped back. Of course, a few scenes later he’s thrown a TV out of a window.

While the baby storylines threaten possible cutesiness and the wacky stunts can get out of hand, if Scrubs keeps to its short and snappy formula, it should remain a tasty treat.

The BBC World Service has been keeping to its formula of earnest neutrality and a noble attempt to unite the globe with carefully balanced news, diffident multiculturalism and a nice cup of tea for 75 years now. If you’ve always lived in Britain, you’ve probably never listened to it, unless you have a habit of fiddling through radio frequencies late at night. But for millions abroad, it represents all of us.

Film-maker Neil Cameron’s three-part documentary, London Calling, has an elegiac quality to it, as the World Service is under severe pressure from budget cuts and increasingly crowded media markets. Many of the local services – in Bulgaria, Poland, Greece, Slovakia – have been closed down and while they’re keen to push into China, the broadcasts are mostly blocked there.

It was interesting to hear how popular the station is in Afghanistan, particularly an Archers-style soap opera called New Home New Life, and to see the problems caused for the Russia service by the death of Alexander Litvinenko. Some claimed the BBC was taking it too easy there for fear of antagonising the government, while dropping a long-running show by veteran dissident DJ Seva Novgorodsev.

Looking like a cross between Jimmy Saville and Johnny Walker, Novgorodsev said gloomily: “When the World Service disappears, Britain disappears from the world map.”

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