Holby Blue BBC One

We keep seeing more of the ancient television city of Holby. For 13 years Casualty cruelly confined to us to the accident and emergency department of its hospital. Then, in 1999, Holby City lured us upstairs to explore the other wards. Yesterday came Holby Blue, which thanks to a convention set by Hill Street Blues, means an invitation to the city’s police station. Holby has become as important to BBC controllers as Walford, the one place it is certain to find viewers.

As long-run, weekly dramas, Casualty and Holby City operate within a band of acceptable quality. Holby Blue sees itself as a cut above. Shot on film, it is less Holby City and more NYPD Blue. Not for it an all-year treadmill: this initial series will run a mere eight weeks. Had there not been a cameo in last night’s opener by Casualty’s Charlie Fair-head and his A&E unit, you’d hardly know you were in Holby at all.

The opening was disorientating as we saw footage of the twin towers in flames and a newsreader talking about the strain that the War on Terror was putting on policing. The central character, DI John Keenan, was soon moaning: “We have 20 armed officers at the airport scratching their backsides while Jenny [an inspector] is jumping through hoops to find enough coppers to tend to emergency calls.” There was an echo here of the early days of Casualty when the hospital struggled under Thatcherite budget cuts.

Unfortunately, this anti-War-on-Terror theme was the only interesting thought that Keenan or, indeed, the show’s creator, Tony Jordan, had in 60 minutes. Keenan, played unsympathetically by Cal Macin-inch, was that most clichéd of TV detectives, the one who won’t play by the book and has a troubled domestic life. Indeed, he was such a cliché that his new deputy, Luke French, told him that he was a cliché while admitting that, as a graduate recruit in a suit, he was a cliché himself.

Both were very at home in the Holby South cop shop, where everyone had a stereotype to live up to: Inspector Jenny, the mumsy headmistress cop; PC Robert, the sexist cop; PC Lucy, the nervous but plucky young cop; DCI Harry, the crusty boss cop who yesterday (and how we felt for the actor Tim Pigott-Smith) had to deliver the inevitable reprimand to Keenan: “Do you know how many rules you broke today? . . . I want a full report on my desk before you leave tonight.”

The most that can be said for Holby Blueis that Jordan pushed his familiar characters around at a healthy pace and sometimes bothered them with expensive dialogue. But we must surely fear where else the BBC will explore in its favourite town. Holby Chalk (about its schools)? Holby Tesco (about its local supermarket)? Holby Recycling (about its TV production centre)?

The Seven Sins of England Channel 4

Originality is so rare on television that I could barely credit what was playing out before my eyes on The Seven Sins of England. The seven sins were drinking, consumerism, hooliganism, slaggishness, rudeness, violence and bigotry, and none of them, unlike the documentary, was confined to Romford. It is not rare to see yobs behaving badly on TV but what was this? One suddenly turned his back on the two women he had just snogged in a nightclub and began reciting with utter confidence from a 17th-century pamphlet about licentiousness: “These young gypsies steal our hearts with such sly alluring hearts as that a man must be a stoic whose blood is not boiling to fermentation at the sight of them.”

The director Joseph Bullman’s inspired film made the simple points that the English working-class have always been yobs, that they have always been condemned, and that they always make us proud on the battlefield. A bovine skinhead replied to centuries of opprobrium: “You’ve got to step back and ask why people are like this and the simple answer is that it is our culture and we love it at the end of the day.” The insights were refreshing but what was beautiful was the craft with which the film’s dislocating conceit of articulacy was realised.

For a while I wondered if this was an art school put-on and that Bullman had recruited Rada students to befriend and betray the Romfordi-ans with lofty historical perspective but my doubts vanished when the most talented of the working-class recruits stopped acting and cried as he revealed that a CAT scan had determined he had received brain damage from a recent fight. Respect.

Lost finally finds its way

There are those who say Lost has lost its way. It now has 48 episodes in which to find it. The producers of the sci-fi saga have announced it will end in 2010 after three more short series of just 16 episodes each. They have promised, what is more, a definitive and “shocking” finale and ABC, which broadcasts it in the US, has promised in turn not to cancel it before then. So certainty at least for viewers, if not for the cast, five of whom, it is rumoured, are to be killed off at the end of the current season.

Shhhh! This is a library

The latest Broadcast has a nice spread on where TV’s top writers work. Most, surprise, surprise, work at home but Tony Marchant, who wrote Mark of Cain, prefers public libraries. “The pros are getting out of the house and having dictionaries and thesauruses around. On the other hand you do get people with mental health issues there – it goes with the territory. Sometimes people shout out involuntarily, breaking your train of thought.”

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