Viewing from the Vaults : General Hospital (1973 / 1975)

[gervase_fen]

Tucked away in The Soap Collection on BritBox (and considering my username I really should get round to watching The Beast Must Die) are select episodes of ATV's daytime soap turned early evening series. Billed as 'the very first episode' is possibly the very first colour film  telerecording to be made available on this (or any other) streaming service.  Some research (Imdb and Roobarb's forum) reveals that this is actually episode 126 (tx 28.12.73), the very first episode to survive in colour.


It makes for a distinctive viewing experience.  The ATV fanfare wows and flutters as we launch directly into an emergency operation in theatre led by Mr William Parker Brown.  Everyone is in scrubs and surgical masks but fortunately Lewis Jones has such presence as the surgical consultant there's at least someone to provide grounding for the novice viewer.  The masks and the lossy soundtrack don't help when it comes to the dialogue, but fortunately (and possibly for this episode for the first time ever) subtitles are avaliable, and we're in the middle of an ethical discussion about permissions needed for organ donation.

Werner Herzog's film "Heart of Glass" (1976) is renowned for the director insisting that his cast perform whilst under hypnosis.  " The hypnotized actors, and many of them were nonactors, seem stilted and somnambulistic; they move as if weighed down and underwater. When the actors interact their glazed eyes look at points far off into some unknowable distance. Everyone’s timing, in speech and action, is off, everyone is disconnected from their surroundings."   ATV''s production techniques in 1973 do not need hypnosis to deliver similar results, and when Nurse Rowland (Sally Knyvette) passes out during the second surgical operation in the episode one wonders if any acting is really required.  Throw in some terrible hiding-in-plain-sight business from Capper, the comedy porter, hostile patients, grumpy specialists and a bizarre line reading delivered straight to camera and you have a unique 23 minutes.

Things improve a great deal with the second episode available, "Due to Natural Causes". tx. 18/7/75 - 46 years old yesterday - as we're now into the show's evening stand alone drama incarnation. There's some exterior location work, for a start,  deploying the classic Casualty trope of people going about their everyday lives before horrible things happen to them. "But she only popped out for some bread" laments Paul Moriarty about his unfortunate soon-to-be kidney donor wife. Tom Adams guest stars as a rival consultant butting heads with Lewis Jones, and it all ends in one of my favourite staples of 70s drama, the board of inquiry. David Garth, in both of these episodes as the hospital administrator, is also good value, effortless at lofty benign authority (last seen by me from him in Terror of the Autons.) Carmen Munroe is given a grisly comedy line to deliver about the Ku Klux Klan, but on the whole this mostly stands up, and Lewis Jones is terrific.

 

Comments

[sir_guinglain]

I really have to watch these. The series is mostly memorable from my point of view as the programme broadcasting when trying to tune in my grandparents' old black and white set using a portable aerial in Nottingham in summer 1976, in a premature attempt to let me have my own television in my bedroom. ATV was the only channel we could get. Up the hill, other households found Yorkshire easier to receive, but we couldn't find either nor the two BBC channels.

[gervase_fen]

I hope BritBox adds more episodes. IMDB has hardly any credits for the few that have been selected, so I was delighted to find that one of them is by David Fisher, "Twice Shy".

[sir_guinglain]

I must make more of my TV Brain subscription...