Cardiac Arrest

Gripping, compulsive viewing. This series was the BBC at its best. It sits alongside the likes of Tenko, Edge of Darkness, Brideshead Revisited, This Life as the cream of British drama. Its dark, uncompromising humour never failed to entertain thoroughly. It was so good as it managed to be left field but not esoteric, funny but not soft, sexy but not gratuitously so. It remains Helen Baxendale's best work by a country mile.

This sort of drama has been lost to a seemingly unending tidal wave of reality TV banality. Series producers need to watch this time and again to understand what really works.

It died too soon.

The first time I watched Cardiac Arrest, I remember being shocked and frightened by the reality - mainly because I had been in hospital a few years previous. The acting is superb and although cleverly comedic, it's too close to reality to be truly funny - it's tragic - and so well presented

In each episode I can't help but gasp at the traumatic incidents that the doctors and patients go through - and the superb way that the actors portray them. And even though the series is nearly forty years old, it still resonates today in that nothing much has changed for the nurses, doctors or patients. Such clever writing.

The UK NHS is a national treasure, and this series should be repeated so that today's viewers can appreciate its fantastic history and performance in the face of jobs-worth administrators and uncaring governments.

Outstanding stuff! This is clearly one of the classic dark comedies. Why it's not more highly thought of is a mystery. It could be nostalgia, but I still think it's almost perfect...

There is a lot of great stuff in this. It is perfectly written - harsh but with enough edge to the humour to keep things in balance. I can't fault the casting either; Helen Baxendale hasn't had a better role since and the whole ensemble plays with panache. It sounds simple but so few people get it right - especially in the UK. You can make a darkly hued comic drama work, if you write it properly and cast it well.

Where is it's successor? Come to think of it (especially given it's current relevance) where's the DVD?

I was an A&E nurse at the time this show came out and it's the most realistic hospital based drama until This Is Going To Hurt. However, with both being doctor-centric, the latter heavily downplayed the role of the midwife, whilst Cardiac Arrest was pretty cruel and wide of the mark in its portrayal of nursing staff. The doctors did carry out a lot of roles that nurses perform nowadays, but the nursing staff were not the work shy, nagging bimbos that the show tends to portray them as, particularly not in any A&E department I worked in..

That aside, what the show captures, that other medical dramas miss, is that it is a workplace full of friendships, relationships and teamwork, just as an office or a factory is a workplace, so there's room for humour in amongst the drama. We had to have a sense of humour, otherwise we'd never have got through half the stuff we had to get through.

I just finished rewatching the whole series today, and it was quite nostalgic for me, with it being from my time as a nurse, so I recognised all the equipment, the working practice, the terminology, etc, that a lot of young nurses today might be puzzled by, as things have moved on so much over the past 30 years. I particularly enjoyed A&E being referred to as casualty or cas, as it really irks me when I hear it called ER nowadays. And I don't think there was one character in the whole series that didn't remind me of at least one person I worked with, save the hospital administrators, who were portrayed a bit like the gestapo, suspending someone every other episode and actively looking for reasons to suspend them. Yes, in real life the admin team were probably the least loved people in the hospital, apart from the dreaded Infection Control Nurse, but they weren't pure evil, like the ones in the show.

But it's a fab series, albeit the last episode got a bit daft, and it's a shame more series weren't made, as the central characters were all very watchable. And how could you not fall in love with Helen. Baxendale?

Cardiac arrest has to be the best hospital series made. Yes it was unpopular with the people but was a reflection of life in the NHS not as a patient but as staff. Espically the Junior house doctors who along with the nursing staff make the system work.