The National Health (1973)

I think this must have worked better on stage, for once it hits the big screen it really only comes across as a slightly more earnest, lightly politically charged, “Carry On” or “Doctor at…”, concept with shades of the “Likely Lads” added for good measure. Hospitals always did provide very fertile territory for a sitcom, and here the pithy dialogue goes some way to raising a laugh. The characterisations are, however, all a bit two-dimensional - though that does work rather better when we are watching their own television parody of American medical soaps starring the same actors with some truly dreadful accents. In some ways that attempt at allegory does work. The well funded and slick operation (no pun intended) of the fictional US scenario contrasts quite starkly with it’s “real” UK equivalent, set in a run down London hospital where recycling was popular by necessity rather than environmental friendliness. The NHS is one of those things we Brits call a “National Treasure”, but this film seems content to downplay it’s achievements and it’s significance as one of the world’s oldest and biggest healthcare services that is free at the point of access. I didn’t really love the acting, if I’m honest. Clive Swift’s quirky and observant “Ash” maybe stole the show, but otherwise it has a distinct ring of the “ Carry On” cast-off about it with Donald Sinden and Jim Dale hamming it up annoyingly. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood, or maybe it was just of it’s time when a nation still laughed at “Steptoe” and “Alf Garnett”, but it’s a film that is rarely screened nowadays, and it’s not hard to understand why.