Pissed, Denies Everything." For another, the British version is genuinely disenchanted and resentful, quite prepared for you to take a strong dislike to some of the characters. In ER, as in most American popular series, adversity is just an obstacle to be cleared in style. The hospital is an arena for personal growth, and hurt feelings are nearly always bandaged and given a little kiss before the final credits roll.There is humour, even humour you might, just, describe as off-white. But for the most part the gags are a warming addition to the cool gravity of medical rescue, a reassurance to viewers that the icy command of the doctors is capable of thawing.
For one thing, Cardiac Arrest is prepared to make fun of acronyms, a grave breach of the telly doc's Hippocratic Oath. The point is to make your head spin, not to instruct you in resuscitation techniques, and almost anything would achieve the same effect - "Quick, he's losing interest, the lids are dropping! Nurse, draw me up three mils of Obscurose, with an IV of Jargonoxomyl Sustain with with Gobbledegookamine at 15-minute intervals. Now!"Off duty, on the other hand, the two dramas are very different. When everyone's at work, the two dramas are almost identical. The stuff you can understand is mostly inaudible and the stuff you can hear is mostly incomprehensible. It's all urgency - a rattle of initials and trade names to quicken the pulse of armchair patients. I take it on trust that the things they shout are reasonably authentic, but it wouldn't matter much if they weren't. By a coincidence of scheduling, you can compare this peculiarly British account of a health system going down the toilet with an American equivalent, ER, set in the emergency room of a public hospital.
"Phil," said Claire Maitland in the first episode, briefing a new recruit, "you work in a pool of excrement - your job is to swim for the shallow end." Last week the metaphor was stood on its end - "You find that as you climb the ladder the droppings from above just get a bit warmer," observed one of the National Health Service's walking wounded, after an encounter with the hospital manager (boo, hiss). Cardiac Arrest (BBC1), back for a second series, appears to have lost none of its lavatorial scorn. Jacobi's performance gives you the odd valuable hint that the Pope's decision to renounce temporal power is prompted as much by a desire for revenge on the clergy as by luxury-eschewing spirituality. It's not his fault that such ambiguities aren't more intricately explored in the text. As a foretaste of the new regime at Chichester, they could have chosen less bland fare than this, but to Jacobi the actor, mitres off.n Box office: 01243 781312Paul Taylor.
His enemies are either blaggards like the blackmailing Belfast bigot Sant (Wesley Murphy) or improbably susceptible to tearjerking rhetoric like John Ravident's huffily gesticulating cardinal.With the Vatican scenes played before a great golden facade, Terry Hands' production is simply and strikingly staged, even though to Rolfe's exorbitant tastes in these matters it might seem a trifle low church. A genuine leap of altruistic empathy on the Pope's part? Only if you'd include under that heading Narcissus fancying his reflection in the pool.Luke allows the hero to have it every which way. This is at its most breathtaking when Jacobi's Rolfe, now Pope, is supposed to discover human love on meeting Paul Connolly's Rose, a youthful version of his own misfit self, all screwed- up intensity and misunderstood yearning, in the English college in Rome. Where you might have thought it would have given the proceedings an astringent edge of irony, Luke's device of substituting Rolfe, the author, for Rose, his thinly disguised hero, is used as a way of amplifying rather than undercutting the endemic self-pity. All affronted dignity in a shapeless, hole-ridden cardigan, he shows you at first a man who has been reduced to bedsitter poverty, lovelessness and twitchy self-obsession by the Church's blocking of his fierce vocation to the priesthood.What follows is a case of a great performance in search of a decent play.
Luke's Hadrian VII is based on Frederick Rolfe's eccentric autobiographical novel of 1904, a wish-fulfilling fantasy wherein a rejected would-be priest and writer finds himself elected Pope. The potentially interesting difference is that Luke makes no bones about the identity of the protagonist and brings in material from Rolfe's bizarre real-life career of serendipitous self- deception ("Baron Corvo" was one of the titles he assumed) and paranoid embattlement. Jacobi is superb within the limits of the play. Thought of as a dramatic offering about the nature of compensatory delusions, the evening is a somewhat hollow charade, for Peter Luke's play keeps ducking the issues its format raises. Now, in Hadrian VII, he's clambered back into canonicals to impersonate an even dodgier case: a man who was elevated to the papacy and martyrdom only in his own overwrought imaginings. Thought of as a sort of Pope-mobile, an unashamed vehicle for Jacobi, who is Chichester's new artistic director, the evening has its definite pleasures.