Doctors and Nurses: Britain's National Health Service is no laughing matter. Having been created by Aneurin Bevan in a post-war wave of egalitarian euphoria, it has been progressively ground down by constant underfunding and excessive bureaucracy, just like our own GMS.
There have been many dramas based on the NHS, most successfully Cardiac Arrest a few years ago, but is comedy a suitable vehicle for debating the ills and shortcomings of a health service? Doctors and Nurses tries to do so.
Set in the Isle of Wight, the series resolves around two orthopaedic surgeons who can't stand each other but who need to feed off each other to survive.
Their portrayal is largely a caricature. Roy is totally immersed in the NHS, with little time for anything else and he comes to work by bus.
George is far more interested in anything but the NHS; his minimal involvement means he can spend more time in private practice and becomes rich in the process; he drives a Rolls-Royce.
George, unfortunately, is by far the better surgeon so Roy needs his skills in difficult cases from time to time.
George is also aware that Roy's dedication means he can spend more time skiving off in private practice. Waiting lists don't bother him - you won't appreciate something unless you have to wait for it is his philosophy. They are Siamese twins bound by conflicting ideology.
Other characters include a bevy of nurses who resort to raising funds by auctioning dead patients' belongings and finding out which male patient has the longest penis by measuring them under the guise of bed baths.
A moronic house officer, and a feminist registrar who points out that the hospital has only one female consultant orthopaedic surgeon - and she used to be a man - are other examples.
Perhaps the best fun in this rather mediocre series (which was written by a pair of doctors currently "resting" from the profession) is the humour aimed at the administrative staff, whose philosophy seems to be that hospitals are great places to work in if it wasn't for the patients. At best they are an inconvenience, getting in the way by interfering with budgetary plans.
The hospital manager is a former employee of a supermarket chain and tries to run the hospital using marketing strategies at odds with health and illness.
Occasionally Roy and George suspend their cold-war, in their own interests, in an alliance against administration.
The humour is infantile, slapstick, littered with profanities and soon gets quite tiresome, so the viewer gets distracted from the real issues and dilemmas of supply, demand and under-resourcing that the programme is trying to highlight. Adrian Edmondson (Roy) featured as one of those anarchic, foul mouthed students in The Young Ones about 20 years ago, He may have less hair now, wear a tie and belong to a respected profession but his level of humour remains much the same.
The main message from this series is that the NHS is enslaved by bureaucracy, to which we in Irish health care can relate only too well. But the message is not served well by this clumsy "comedy".
Doctors and Nurses, BBC 1, Tuesday 10.35p.m.
• Dr Charles Daly is a general pratitioner in Co Waterford