HOSPITAL PEOPLE, BBC1, 9.30pm
I WAS amazed at the amount of hate and scorn directed at poor old Hospital People last week. I liked the show. It made me chuckle. It’s hardly comic genius but is obviously streets ahead of the usual broad and dumbed-down Friday night prime-time fare. Yet everyone on Twitter seemed to hate it.
So I ask you to give it one more chance. Tonight the hospital mockumentary guest stars Sian Gibson of Peter Kay’s Car Share. She plays a security guard who, inexplicably, fancies the hospital DJ, Ivan Brackenbury – “He’s the cock that wakes you up” – but he’s too dim to take the hint.
The creepy hospital porter continues to drift through the wards, trying to assure the elderly he can see their guardian angels.
The bossy manager, Susan, isn’t especially funny tonight, but there are plenty of cheeky gags and sly one-liners delivered by the others. I don’t understand why everyone hates it so much.
UNREPORTED WORLD, C4, 7.30pm
WE’RE always being told that the current obesity epidemic is caused by our Western lifestyle: desk-bound jobs, commuting by car, snacking on supermarket junk food because we’re too tired to cook something fresh, and our nippers won’t go outside because of baddies and Playstations.
Yet the area with the highest rate of obesity isn’t in the urban, rich, decadent West, it’s in the Samoan Islands, out in the Pacific Ocean. “Obesity in paradise” as this documentary calls it, with 93 per cent of the islanders overweight or clinically obese and rates of diabetes climbing fast.
It can’t be blamed on a Western lifestyle, so what’s going wrong in paradise? The reporters finds that unhealthy meats, loaded with fat and deemed unworthy of consumption elsewhere, are being offloaded on to the island market, and foreign processed foods are also becoming popular.
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