The National Health

8/4/2025

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 equiv