Vital Signs (ITV1): I'm bored with my job. What kind of existence is sitting in front of a box all day watching programmes about people with freak medical conditions, police dramas and reality shows?
I need to make a career switch. I think I'll become a brain surgeon, a nuclear physicist or rocket scientist. After all, if supermarket checkout operator Rhoda Bradley can become a doctor without a single A-level, anything is possible in the job market.
Of course, I'm only joking, but Rhoda was deadly serious. "My life, what am I doing with it?," she asked her husband, continuing before he had time to answer: "Sometimes I feel like I'm sitting on this long, slow conveyor belt watching the world go by and one day, before I know it, I'm going to reach the end, get shoved in a box, carted off and - gone, thank you, have a nice day, next".
You might reasonably think that she had more pressing matters to worry about than her career. Such as her daughter, having an emergency operation in hospital. Or her son who has cystic fibrosis.
Amazingly, her ambition to join the medical profession seems to be possible. I assume the makers can produce evidence that such drastic career changes can happen to someone who left school at 16 with no qualifications because she was pregnant.
As she's played by Tamzin Outhwaite, Rhoda has a credibility that may help suspend disbelief for the rest of the series as she works her way through medical school.
Vital Signs combines two of ITV1's favourite drama themes - a strong mother undergoing a life change and a doctors-and-nurses setting. How can it fail?
Rhoda confesses that she's dying of boredom stacking and checking at the supermarket. Then she's turned down for promotion. The turning point is daughter Lexie being admitted to hospital with appendicitis. Her anxious mother quizzes the thirtysomething chap in the white coat with a stethoscope about Lexie's condition only to be told, "I'm not a doctor, I'm a medical student".
She learns of a scheme to recruit older people to go into medicine. So don't be surprised when you're lying in a hospital bed and a white-haired grannie leaning on a Zimmer frame starts examining you.
So with no degree and no A-levels, Rhoda embarks on getting accepted in medical school despite friends Jules' worry that she wants "to spend your day prodding and poking people's bits". After all, she could go and work in a Soho massage parlour if she wanted to do that. And the hours would be more social.
This being a TV drama, her family accept this with barely a moan. Only son Jason is miffed that the money for his new motorbike is spent on her admission fees.
He's also upset when he overhears her saying she wants more out of life than to "stack shelves and wait for my son to die". She'll have to improve her bedside manner, if she wants to pass those doctor's exams.
Published: 21/04/2006
