TV preview: The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs; Steptoe and Son

Sean O’Grady gives us the lowdown on BBC1’s latest medical experiment and BBC4’s bittersweet comedy revival

Dr Chris Van Tulleken investigates whether it’s time we went cold turkey on medication (BBC)

The proposition behind the first instalment of the latest BBC medical experiment is that we all take far too many drugs for our own good. Dr Chris Van Tulleken works as an infections specialist in a hospital, and so has witnessed at first-hand the rise of the resistant bacteria – so-called “superbugs” – that have caused so much hysteria over the past few years. Maybe, according to the good doctor, even that level of hysteria isn’t hysterical enough, as, if the worst predictions are to be believed, eventually the bugs will become completely immune to whatever us human beings can throw at them and, in due course, human life on earth will be extinguished.

Not that such considerations are uppermost in the minds of the hard-pressed medics at the Churchill Clinic in Chingford, Essex, though they recognise the danger. Sincere, hardworking and dedicated, they do prescribe an awful lot of medication. Dr Chris says they don’t need to. So he picks two patients with fairly commonplace complaints – depression and back pain – and starts to find out whether they would indeed be better off without their respective cocktails of pills.

Did you, by any chance, stumble when I said depression is “commonplace”. All I would say to that is that 5 million Britons are on these drugs, of varying intensities, and one in five people in one of the worst towns for it, Blackpool, are on medication for clinical depression. I suspect that this is because of the effects of the chronic economic decline that has blighted this former centre for fun, but it is also because alternative remedies, such as exercise, are rarely attempted. Without being disrespectful to the country’s 40,000 GPs (mine have always been excellent), they do dish out 15 billion prescriptions a year, or 15 for every man, woman and child in the land. From antibiotics to beta blockers, from paracetamol to steroid sprays, most of us will take a fairly formidable dosage; yet few believe that every ill can be cured by a pill.

I am reluctant to write again about the BBC’s experiment at reviving old comedies, because it’s been a bit of a disappointment on the whole, but the BBC’s disinterment of Steptoe and Son impels me to do so. Unlike the revivals/remakes of Til Death us Do Part and Are You Being Served?, patchy successes at best, I have to tell you that this one actually works, actually makes you giggle, and actually leaves you wanting more.

Jeff Rawle and Ed Coleman will make you chuckle in the Steptoe and Son revival

Charmingly they’ve retained that famous theme tune (“Old Ned” by BBC stalwart Ron Grainer, who also composed the Doctor Who theme about the same time), while Jeff Rawle and Ed Coleman pay fine homage to Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett’s performances as Albert and Harold, which the nation embraced in the 1960s and 1970s. But that wouldn’t be enough to makes this episode come alive. In fact, there’s no great puzzle about why this one has some vitality: it’s that original coruscating script by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, whose craftsmanship, as also witnessed in their work for Tony Hancock, has rarely been bettered. So their creations have aged much better than, say, Johnny Speight’s Alf Garnett.

This old comedy reboot actually leaves you wanting more

Anyway, this daily tale of Shepherd’s Bush rag‘n’ bone men was originally broadcast in 1970 (the recording, as with so many others, since wiped and lost forever) and follows some familiar G+S themes. It is, once again, a painful exercise in watching Harold’s social aspirations, this time for a skiing holiday in unthinkably glamorous Austria, being thwarted by his miserable old sod of a dad (“What’s wrong with Bognor anyway?”). It’s still bittersweet stuff, poignancy counterpointed with vulgarity: I’d almost forgotten how much I miss Albert and Harold.

The Doctor Who gave Up Drugs: BBC1, 9pm, Thursday 15 September; Steptoe and Son: BBC4, 9pm, Wednesday 14 September