Introducing Cardiac Arrest

Sometimes I feel like a fandom of one on this one. I’ll nominate it for Yuletide, but will there be any takers?

Cardiac Arrest, television series. Aired on the BBC from 1994–1996, available on DVD since 2007.

Setup: it’s an NHS hospital, full of overworked junior doctors who are variously catty, idealistic, mean, careless, frustrated and always always sleep deprived.

Things going for it:

• black humour
• funny black humour
• Dr Claire Maitland, snarky talented resident/registrar. Will probably remind House fans of him to some extent, except without the singular medical genius, or heavy-handed attempts on the part of the producers to heal her of her mean ways. In terms of drug use I think she only gets to cigarettes and alcohol though.
• It was written by someone who left his junior position at the NHS to write it. British doctors loved it. If you have knowledge of medical settings it’s apparently pretty good in terms of being humour about your life.
• reasonable representation (by which I mean, appearances of, realistic portrayals of I can’t speak to as well) of minorities and their experience working in the NHS.

Basically, if you like the idea of unvarnished black humour about doctors, I recommend this.

Things you might not like (I realise some people are cool with these, or enjoy them, but for those who don’t, here’s some warnings):

• character death
• at times, kind of random minor character death, but it is a hospital drama and I think they’re going for more realistic death rates
• multiple depictions of self-harm (by women doctors)
• some graphic-ish depiction of medical procedures
• a large number of bungled medical procedures
• at some point I think every point-of-view character knowingly perpetrates at least one of sexism (including harassment), ableism, racism or classism. They aren’t portrayed as sympathetic actions in and of themselves (in my reading) but you will be expected to sympathise with some of those same characters later. And it’s not a series where proportionate punishments are dealt out for this kind of thing, ie, there’s not always a moral
• the first series in particular has notoriously nasty portrayals of nurses. They aren’t absent like in a lot of medical dramas, but they’re worse at their jobs than doctors. This improves mightily in series three in particular, when a sister becomes a major player in the plot
• it never portrays hospital bureaucrats at all affectionately
• the first series is very low budget, the writing is still finding its feet, the lighting is poor and it’s the one in which the junior doctors are most hopelessly trapped by their chosen career. Fortunately it’s short and was popular enough that someone gave them more money for series two. You should still watch it, and it’s not unrepresentative of the show, but if you’re thinking “I’d like it if it knocked off the rough edges” hang in there