With Dickensian compassion and Swiftian thrusts,Mr P.Whitehouse demolishes the fashionable N.H.S. policy of treating those with mental health issues on the cheap,relying on overworked,stressed out and sometimes frankly inadequate nurses to cope with huge caseloads of vulnerable sick people apparently armed only with jargon and a thirty minute time - frame. The eponymous "Nurse" - played with brilliant bewilderment by Miss E.Coles - is herself hardly a paragon of mental stability with her marriage in tatters and having no life outside her job other than desperately struggling to bring up her teenage daughters. Her patients range from the young soldier back from Afghanistan suffering from P.T.S.D. to the old lady with dementia whose main memory is dancing before the Queen mum at eight years of age. There is a middle = aged woman clearly drugged up to her eyeballs who can only say "Yeah...I s'pose" or "No...I s'pose" whose house is full of not particularly well - mannered cats,the Willie Nelson lookalike old - time villain who is afraid to leave his house and a former concert pianist whose mind is gently slipping away...."You must excuse me,I need to go and masturbate"" he tells the nurse matter - of - factly. Mr Whitehouse,surely the Orson Wells of Britsh TV,plays all the male roles in a wonderful display of virtuosity that in another might be seen as showing off,but it is all done without film - flammery. "Nurse" is a savage comedy that takes no prisoners. But it highlights the impossible tasks set health professionals charged with caring for their clients armed only with received wisdom,fixed ideas and barely time to get the chairs warm. It will make you laugh and shudder at the same time as Miss Coles blithely dispenses second - hand ideas and distant kindness,oblivious to the fact that she is doing no good whatsoever and the only real help and care her patients are likely to get will come from friends,eighbours or relatives who can offer love and comfort and don't have to rush off for their next appointment. Brilliant television and the BBC - often the target of my scorn - deserves to be congratulated for having the courage to transmit it.