Comedy news: SSP TV Blog: Nurse Jackie and The Bubble

By Andrew Mickel, Such Small Portions

NURSE JACKIE FINISHES: NATION GOES OFF MEDS
BBC2, Monday, 10pm
Ah, the life of a channel scheduler. What larks! Take Nurse Jackie: it was stripped across one week at the beginning of the year every night at 10pm, before spontaneously shifting to once a week on a Monday.

Not that the viewing public seemed plussed one way or another, as the show started with a tad over a million viewers, before gently drifting into the not-exactly-great six-figure territory.

That's a shame, as it is good Monday fodder: it's just by-the-numbers enough not to make you think at the beginning of the week, while just-about-original enough to make you keep watching.
So how can the viewing public be made to care about Nurse Jackie?

HOW TO MAKE THE VIEWING PUBLIC CARE ABOUT NURSE JACKIE

Make Jackie actually quite good at her job.
The show goes to great lengths to tell us how great Jackie is at her job, while gently ignoring the fact that she breezes off for long restaurant lunches; at least once an episode has some sort of major fuck-up; and has at no point been particularly good at anything clinical. She's also not the most empathetic character on the world. Why not actually make her good at her job?

What we're basically asking for here is something more like Abby from ER, but with gags. Abby!, it could be called.

More of the posh British doctor, please
Where has Eve Best been hiding all these years? Well, the theatre, mainly, while also serving tours of duty through Waking the Dead and Inspector Lynley, according to (research quality alert) Wikipedia. Dr O'Hara only gets a few lines per episode but it always nicely contrasts her high living with Jackie's farcical job/family/affair arrangement. Watching her laugh herself silly at Dr Cooper's advances on Jackie remains the highlight of the series.

Axe the right characters
Mo-Mo, a gay nurse of the finger-snapping variety, has been axed for the second series. While not exactly the most complex character ever created, it seems a shame to shelve him while keeping the hospital administrator Mrs Akalitus. She's in charge of an American hospital, and often puts profits ahead of patient's interests! Wow, that's some deep stuff right there.

Make Dr Cooper take his clothes off
Fairly self-explanatory, that one.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE BUBBLE
BBC Two, Fridays, 10pm

The Bubble is one of those shows that sounds like a great idea in principle – lock three celebrities away without news for four days, and then make them guess which of a series of faked and real news reports actually happened – but that loses something in the delivery.

The big problem is that the news stories here are too daft to care about. Big Daddy's ghost haunting York; Thomas the Tank Engine gets a gay character; some guff about Mumsnet. They would once upon a time have been called 'And Finally' stories, before they started making up so much of the average ITV News bulletin that it stopped being a meaningful term.

So why can't real news stories be used? Taking the top stories on BBC News right now, there are pretty good reasons.

Too sad/'real'.

Too boring.

Too implausible. (Although there's definitely a joke in there where we can pretend that Mandelson is supporting Chris Brown's post-Rhianna career rehabilitation, we're just not sure how.)

Still, this is a show with David Mitchell, and for the first episode, Victoria Coren, which pretty much guarantees every under-40 with a humanities degree will have tuned in. Indeed, the show seems to get by on the fact that having locked some well-chosen comedians together for several days, there's a vague sort of camaraderie about the whole thing.

We just need to see an episode where Marcus Brigstocke is shown footage of a major terrorist atrocity and then has to work out whether or not he should make jokes about it.

Andrew Mickel