Paul Whitehouse’s latest series, Nurse, is pretty bold for a comedy. It deals with mental health issues, following community mental health nurse Liz (Esther Coles) as she goes from patient to patient. Most of them played by Whitehouse with the aid of some pretty impressive prosthetics, which only occasionally make Nurse look like the world’s worst Aviva Insurance ad.
There’s Herbert, the elderly man in a muddle. Ageing rocker Ray who has to be injected in the bum to calm him down. There is Graham, clinically obese and in a mutually dependent relationship with his mother Janet (Rosie Cavaliero, who also plays a dotty cat-obsessed lady). Then there is agoraphobic ex-con Billy, who is out of jail but craves the structure of prison.
Doesn’t sound like a bundle of laughs does it? And it isn’t. This is comedy, written by Whitehouse with long-time collaborator David Cummings and Coles, with the tragedy and the bittersweet foregrounded. But yet behind the misery there is humour. Herbert has to find the time in his day to masturbate, Billy has some comic banter with fellow old lag Tony (Simon Day) and Doc Brown and Colin Hoult offer light refreshment as a couple of cops.
But this is very much Whitehouse’s show. It started on Radio 4 but feels like a natural successor to his past shows Happiness and Help, which both dug into the troubling side of the human condition. He is doing the same here while also getting slightly political by showing how important and how overstretched the NHS is.
Whitehouse has always intrigued me. I’ve interviewed him a number of times over the last two decades and whenever I have tried to probe beneath the skin he has always been quick to deflect my enquiries with a comic put-down.
Naturally this makes me wonder if there is more going on below the surface than the cheeky chappie Fast Show persona. Even in the Fast Show though, with characters such as Rowley Birkin, Whitehouse was not afraid to go for more than a simple laugh.
Whitehouse has notched up enough laugh credits in his time to allow him to make something more serious. There aren’t any catchphrases here that kids will be quoting in the playground, but there is plenty here that will stick in the memory.
Nurse, 10pm, BBC2, from March 10.
