When I saw the first episode of Quacks I was electrified. At long last, we had Blackadder-standard TV again! The three main cast members were striving to advance medical science, took themselves extremely seriously and were totally incompetent – a good starting point for comedy. I can't include the one leading female character in this as she was obviously the only one with a brain. Set in the mid-1800s, a lot of the gags were to do with how bad things were in those days, in this case the severely unequal society and scientific knowledge & medicine in general. So cheap laughs and grotesque characters were gloriously abundant (to our shame, we all like to giggle at how ignorant and silly people used to be – oh well, laugh while you can, I suppose). There were several occasions when laughter just shot out of me quite involuntarily. One scene involved the revolutionary use of ether to render a patient unconscious during an operation. In his vanity, Rory Kinnear's Lessing, 'England's finest surgeon', briefly stops his unhygienic hacking to smoke a cigarette with a fine artistic flourish. Unfortunately, a careless match sets the ether alight causing panic and pandemonium. Sick humour? No, to me, grown-up and hilarious. The next two episodes were also gloriously farcical – I was hooked. Then something strange happened. It was as though the writer (plus producers? The BBC?) ran out of confidence, time, ideas, creativity or essential push to move it on. Despite the cast's best efforts, it actually became bland. It was as though the series arrived at a crossroads. A signpost pointing one way said 'Satirical, difficult and funny'. The sign pointing the other way said, 'Sort of soap opera and easy'. The remaining episodes took the latter route. A Very Great Shame.
