australian television information archive

Health runs hot

YOU COULD be forgiven for presuming that those responsible for MDA  have been paying more than passing attention to recent events in the Queensland health system.

In tonight’s episode, a young, talented and ambitious anaesthetist is given the opportunity to work alongside one of his hospital’s most respected surgeons.

He is shocked, however, by the duration of heart surgery on an infant and, when he raises this, is told that there is no cause for concern.

The child survives the surgery but dies shortly afterwards, causing the anaesthetist to make discreet inquiries which reveal a high mortality rate among the surgeon’s patients.

Does the anaesthetist risk his career and blow the whistle on someone who he believes is no longer competent and is endangering his patients’ lives or say nothing, be part of the system and concentrate on his own success?

While he struggles with his conscience, the MDA  team is defending a doctor who administered a spinal anaesthetic which has left a patient with a permanent disability.

Did the bad tempered, highly nervous doctor bungle and was he in full control of his faculties on that fateful night?

MDA  is one of those rare television products which has increased in quality and appeal as it has progressed.

It faltered in early episodes with some uncertain performances by the key players but it has matured into one of the better dramas presently being broadcast.

Its appeal may be helped by the currency of its subject matter, any program dealing with dodgy doctors sure to strike a sympathetic chord with a Queensland audience.

Regardless, it is quality fare.

Elsewhere, it’s another day and another reality program with Channel 10 trotting out Stooged  as the latest result of the ongoing search to find new ways in which to employ hidden cameras.

The stooges in Stooged  are the friends of the contestants, contestants whose task it is to convince them of the veracity of an outrageous lie.

The lies become less believable as the episode progresses with two competing liars in each program and the studio audience judging the winner.

In tonight’s episode, one of the contestants tells his friends that he has been posing as a doctor at a local hospital using forged credentials. He also has been performing surgery and recently removed an appendix.

Sound familiar? Is there a theme developing here among Australian television producers?

Stooged  is mindless, light and mildly entertaining. You will have forgotten you have watched it within moments of the final credits rolling but if that’s what you seek, it will serve your wants.

In Talking Heads, Lorraine Bayly harks back to her halcyon days as Grace in The Sullivans, one of the most popular Australian dramas ever produced.

Bayly, now 68 and looking considerably younger, is the interviewer’s dream, bright, effervescent and an accomplished performer.

She wanders through the old ABC studios at Gore Hill, now being demolished, and past the studios in which for 12 years from 1969 she appeared on Play School.

She has had, as she tells it, a remarkably rich life albeit one with its share of tragedy and trauma, among these tragedies being the divorce of her parents when she was seven and her subsequent separation from her mother and sister.

She speaks of her late partner Steve, her “soul mate” who died of a heart attack, her performance rating as one of the better of the Talking Heads  episodes.

By Mike O'Connor
July 28, 2005
The Courier Mail