Green Wing
The Age
Thursday February 14, 2008
Green Wing
Hopscotch, 468 mins, MA, TV comedy, Series 1, 20043/5.5A comedy nominally set in a hospital but don't expect anything like Scrubs: no sly loveable whimsy and you can forget little things such as plotlines. Green Wing, created by writer Victoria Pile, is unpredictable, meandering, character-based, absurd, excruciating (mostly in a good way), pushing-the-bounds-of-taste British comedy that takes place in an institutional medical setting, punctuates the action with speeded-up and slow-motion interludes, dispenses with tedious distractions such as patients and makes the most of its 50-minute episodes and its talented cast. Its characters are (almost without exception) barking mad, diabolically manipulative or quietly obsessive: standouts include Tamsin Greig, from Black Books, who plays a new, registrar bordering on normality, Stephen Mangan as a would-be philandering anaesthetist, Michelle Gomez as a pyscho HR manager and Julian Rhind-Tutt as a witty but distant surgeon. When the show falls flat, it falls really flat - this is true of almost any scenes featuring the amour fou stylings of the radiologist. But when it hits the mark, it's messily hilarious. DVD extras include: commentaries.
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