In Britain we seem to like success but are fascinated by failure. This is reflected in our popular television. We loved a failed manager (The Office), a failed hotelier (Fawlty Towers), failed totters (Steptoe and Son), failed human beings (Hancock’s Half Hour). Admittedly, comedy is about the gap between aspiration and achievement, and that means failure, yet the Americans, who adore success, manage to find humour in largely functional characters. Frasier might have been clownish, but he was an esteemed psychotherapist. Cosby was a thriving doctor, and the various Friends had decent jobs, most of the time. Even Joey, the only idiot among them, starred in a daytime soap.
It’s not just comedy. We relish failed restaurateurs (Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares) and failed amateur cooks (Come Dine With Me). Bossy people such as Trinny and Susannah tell us how we’ve failed at dressing ourselves. Captains of industry arrive to rescue businesses whose owners are racing towards the bankruptcy court. Or take quizzes. The Weakest Link is all about the losers — whoever notices the winner? Everyone might want to be a millionaire on ITV, but almost nobody is. Eggheads centres on the daily hope then humiliation of the amateur team. When Gail Trimble did so well on University Challenge the papers were full of articles moaning, in effect, that she wasn’t playing the game by getting a few wrong. The BBC had to use a technicality to turn her team into losers, but since her Corpus team still has the trophy, in effect both teams lost — a perfect British result.
One of the very best programmes in this mould is the new sitcom, or sit-traj, Getting On (BBC4, Wednesday), which is about a bunch of failures running a failed NHS geriatric ward. You wouldn’t think there were many chuckles in the subject, and indeed where there are the laughter tends to die on your lips. The nurses are going through the pitiful belongings of a woman who has just died on her 87th birthday. Though she has her own teeth, they find a set of dentures in her drawer.
‘I think she’s kept her husband’s teeth.’
‘It’s a nice souvenir, isn’t it?’
‘You could keep it on a pendant.’
The programme is directed by Peter Capaldi, who appeared in The Thick Of It, and it uses the same faux-documentary technique. It was only the presence of Jo Brand, who co-wrote it with the two other principal actresses, that forced you to realise that it was fictional. The first episode turned on the discovery of a turd on a chair which calls forth various PC reactions: ‘Don’t call it shit, it’s faeces.’ Brand’s slatternly character is caught between two contrary forces of NHS bureaucracy — the doctor who needs to keep the turd for research purposes, and the male matron who wants it disposed of immediately. ‘Does Mrs A live here?’ he asks, and on being told there’s no Mrs A on the ward, snaps, ‘MRSA!’ Brand and her colleague may be vague and inept — the hopeless tending the helpless — but in their own sloppy way they care for the patients, whereas the bureaucrats who are grinding them down care only for their targets.
The episode ended with the nurses trying to hide from the dead woman’s sister the fact that they are eating the birthday cake she had baked. Funny, of course. Heart-stoppingly sad, too. I’m pretty sure Getting On will make it to terrestrial television, because it is very good, painfully well observed, and because it’s about failure.
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