At the beginning of the first, ambulance-chasing episode of Blues and Twos (ITV), a documentary series about the emergency services, a male voice intones: “Everything you are about to see is real.” The good idealist chuckles in the face of such an extravagant claim; so should the good television audience. The ways in which documentary films are artificial and selective need no rehearsing. But in order to explore the phenomenon of medical programming – which at present occupies more than six hours per week of the prime-time British schedules – we might, temporarily, accept that naïvely realist boast. For this will furnish a tool for unmasking the comparable, but inexplicit – and perhaps more pernicious – claims made by the current slew of medical drama series.

In part, Blues and Twos has borrowed the flashy threads of its fictive cousins. Here, for instance, is the identikit music: the unearthly microtonal melody of a siren cudgelling the composer’s harmonic ambitions (such as they might have been) into the minimalist shape of a visceral four-square riff. Here, too, are the introductions to the dramatis personae: “leading ambulanceman Stevie Watkins, and his partner, paramedic Stuart Murdoch”. Here is the mixture of unsettling catastrophe (a woman suffers a heart attack and dies) and light relief (a 12-year-old boy has drunk himself stupid on lager), in the mini-stories of the patients. Here is the pre-advertisement cliffhanger, and the final tying-up of loose ends: the stitching-up of the therapeutically violated body of “reality”. Continued →