The Pink Medicine Show
This is a show I've had in the back of my mind to write about here for ages. What has so far stopped me doing so is that the show is barking mad and I really didn't know how to convey it.
It is a comedy sketch show written by two actual doctors. It does not have the common problem that shows about doctors or clergymen aren't written by doctors or clergymen: this is the real thing. It's about as subtle as s very bad dose of herpes and you just know it was written by men who've spent years being shown diseased bits. For this reason it may not appeal to everyone's humour. However if you were a staff nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Psychiatric Hospital in the 1990s and passed on the gossip about the nurse who went home drunk, put on the chip pan and started to get undressed before passing out and having to be carried out in his undies by the fire brigade, or about the student nurse who was in the News of the World because she was supplementing her grant on the game and telling her clients she was a student nurse, this will make you laugh like a drain.
It is apparently named after a proverb (that I'm not familiar with) about a dose of pink medicine being a cure for anything.
We don't only get the medics as the subject of the joke. We get the patients' impossible questions. Like a man who tells the staff nurse at 3am that he's having a heart attack and when the doctor gets there just wants to tell him about his bowels: what turns this into the comedy is that he is regular as clockwork at 8am every morning, but the trouble is he only gets up at nine). We get the patient who can't get as far as actually taking his tablets because he's asking the doctor questions about which chemist to go to and whether it's early closing, and what to eat before taking them, and how can he take them because he has to take four tablets a day after food but only eats three times a day - he ends by asking the doctor if he wants anything from the greengrocers.
I love the bit where the patient auditions to register on a GP's panel by coughing in a theatre (they're not impressed because it was much better when he was rehearsing it in the bathroom the nibght before.
I love the operation that is commentated as if it is a football match and the way the surgeons are then interviewed in the bath after the match (and get those sideburns).
And don't miss the musical sketch called The NIght They Invented Schizophrenia.
I see from the reviews on IMDB that other people are comparing this to Monty Python - beyond being rather anarchic I can't personally see the similarity, but it does seem as if the show strikes people different ways, because while I have read many glowing reviews from adults who were in their teens when this was broadcast and loved this because it was naughty, there are also some which describe it as absolutely atrocious. My own only criticism of it is that it does come across as a bit patchy, and some of the sketches are definitely not as asuccessful as others. Its quality, however, is shown in that it was cancelled after one series and its approach and subject matter would be unlikely to make it popular with TV executives. Three out of the show's six episodes are on YouTube.
Oh alright, I know you want a 'sample'. Geddit?
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