Soap

There are currently only two Soaps in my life. The Archers (obviously) and Holby City.

I love the Archers because, well, what's not to love? It has cows, picnics on Lakey Hill, birdwatching by the river Am and characters I've grown up with. Currently, Jonny (son of John) who died by driving an old tractor too fast two days after my son was born, has got a job for the snobby Aldridges to drive a big shiny tractor too fast. This could end badly but as I won't have given birth three days before I probably won't cry.

Holby City is a soap I don't really understand my affection for. I've never liked Casualty, which always seems a bit overly dramatic. Holby is calmer. It's also a fantasy hospital. I'm going there if I'm ever sick because everyone gets diagnosed and cured within an hour. My dad always said that he would have liked Doc Martin as a GP because he always knows what's going on. "But he's so rude," I would argue. Both Mum and Dad thought rude honesty would be preferable. I watched the first series of Ambulance (set in London) and really enjoyed it. There is something unintentionally funny about near-death situations, which the programme brought out. This series is set in Stoke and the flat Midlands accents and schmultzy music are sucking the funny out. A man who'd got stuck in bed and joked with the paramedics that he had the "full English breakfast of cancers," was questioned on his sense of humour, while the paramedics looked at him doe-eyed with  sad string music in the background. It could have been funny. I agreed with the man when he said, "what else is there to do but laugh?"

Realistic hospital programmes would be funny and boring. Someone should make a programme about the corridors. Doctors and nurses wander up and down corridors looking lost. They can't find rooms, patients, other doctors. Patients sit being patient. Appointment at 3, still waiting at 4.30. No problem. Some demand to see a certain doctor, others get cross and irritable: their patience training isn't going so well. They all wonder if they have time to get a coffee or go to the toilet. A nurse comes to get the next in line. They are a newbie. Their relative asks if they can come too. The nurse says, "Of course," before thinking, taking a sudden step back and saying, "are you together?" The people next to them laugh, stand up and say, "Can we come too?" A doctor sticks his head out of the door and one of the patient's relatives recognises him from a previous operation. Automatically she winks at him and he winks back before scuttling back into his room both wondering why they had done that. Maybe it was the stress. Maybe it was the boredom. The people sit listening to children crying, they watch people who look ill and those who don't but are shocked and dazed, pale and shaking at the bad news they've just been given.

Maybe it's the unrealistic nature of Holby that I like.