The pouting, preaching crap that is Holby City

Just because broadcasters CAN aim endless crap docs’n’cops dramas at thick viewers, I really don’t think they should be allowed to.

I’m not usually a fan of State regulation of broadcasting, but there is simply too much TV of the stupid kind in the digital era – and most of it is a sinful waste of creative energy.

Broadcasters’ airtime should be heavily cut back by force of law – to give quality broadcasts a chance to stand out from the sea of mediocrity and worse.

Holby City, for instance, has been running since it started in1999, but it is rubbish and gets abysmal ratings.

Essentially, a hospital-based soap opera, it features a string of moody medics displaying dysfunctional attitudes to personal relationships, and emotional incontinence at every medical case that comes their way.

The casting is appalling. The characters don’t behave like medics and they don’t look like medics. Most of ‘em have the appearance of thin, blandly good-looking young models and drama school graduates who like to pout. Which is presumably what they are.

Rosie Marcel as consultant cardiothoracic surgeon Jac Naylor is the worst of the bunch. She tries to cover the whole emotional range between A and B but somehow her perma-pout just always gets in the way.

And the writing is crap. Some of the life-or-death dilemmas are so clumsily-written that the viewer needs a heart of stone not to laugh.

I suppose Holby City has been useful for the BBC – as yet another platform on which to push racial and sexual justice agendas. I have no problem with those values in ethical terms but I do deeply resent all the heavy-handed preaching the BBC gets up to in drama.

Holby City has rightly been criticised for its lack of realism, not least by the British Medical Association which denounced the portrayal of organ donation, for instance. Also, an accident and emergency nurse at the 2008 Royal College of Nursing conference accused the programme of fostering unrealistic expectations of the NHS and fuelling compensation culture.