Life

Whoever said the camera never lies was telling a whopper. Whatever your job, it is almost guaranteed that someone has made a TV series about your work in which the truth is not reliably reflected.

The Bill, my plod-friends tell me, is awash with police who would never get sergeant's stripes. Teachers may allude to dynamic young Dead Poet's Society things - except for the fact that the real teachers I know say their two dimensional TV doppelga{"}ngers are "lying wasters who drink more than they get paid". No builder I know thought that Grafters was remotely fair (too much womanising and not enough cement, apparently), and my solicitor friends insist that This Life and Ally McBeal are nonsensical travesties of the (alleged) hardworking truth.

As for my own field: if you want to know what working in healthcare is like, you'd better be pretty selective with your viewing. Don't bother with Casualty, Peak Practice, Doctors or Holby City. They are all, frankly, a saccharine slur on the truth. Those TV doctors and nurses are all too pretty, unrushed, and generally kind; they save lives as if it were as easy and morally obligatory as choosing high fibre breakfast cereal. And medically, the inaccuracies are rife. So profuse, in fact, that they have spawned a drinking game beloved by medical students in which a shot of tequila must be downed for every spotted mistake. Given the number of errors - oxygen tubing not connected, X-ray upside down - it is not a sober game.

The idea that British medical entertainment might teach us about what to do in emergency cases of swamp fever and scorpion bites is rather hopeful, if not clearly misguided. But accuracy is possible. ER is exacting beyond the foam, with the electrocardiographs the right way up and the diagnostics snappy. And never mind the public - ER does a good job in educating doctors. I have ER to thank for a speedy diagnosis I made as a junior doctor while examining a distended abdomen many years ago. It occurred to me that the patient's blood pressure was curiously low just like an episode of the previous week's ER, when their patient had an ultra-urgent case of a ruptured aortic aneurysm. My patient was rushed to theatre and, happily, recovered well.

But doctors adored the grim, searingly accurate series Cardiac Arrest, which ran on the BBC from 1994 for its dark, angry depiction of junior doctors. Written by Dr Jed Mercurio, it told of lazy nurses, hellish rotas and struggling doctors and it was a joy, simply because one could shout: "Yes! That's right! Nurses do eat all the Quality Street!" at the telly. No wonder, though, that the BBC has "no plans" to release it as a DVD. Accurate, oh yes, but cheery it was not, which is why the final episode of the first series of Green Wing (on Channel 4 last night) was a bit traumatic for me.

Bizarrely, for a medical show which makes no attempt to be medically accurate or even very medical, Green Wing is entirely and exactly true to medical life. Refreshingly, there are no infomercials buried in the script about how best to save lives - or embedded messages of the perils of drugs or alcohol either. It is a deeply amusing programme and, like manna to the under-moraled NHS, the scriptwriters have realised that it would be great fun being a doctor if it weren't for the patients, the rotas and the eternal bed crisis.

In Green Wing, there are no patients at all - the exception being anaesthetised ones. And even then, there are never any unexpected complications or monitors bleeping - well, maybe once, but all that Dr Guy Secretan (played by Stephen Mangan) had to say was, "You don't scare me, sleepy," while slapping the monitor a bit, and all reverted to normal.

The administrators and managers are all libidinous and frustrated, and so I don't mind the doctors being exactly the same. The horrors of postgraduate medical exams are depicted entirely accurately (I know, having failed many) and there is time to play the I'm-Sorry-I- Haven't-A-Clue style game of operating in the regional accent of the day, or movie of choice. It's bliss, mainly because Green Wing is so lovingly knowledgeable about the joys there are to be had messing about with your mates while wearing green pyjamas (sorry, surgical greens).

There are lessons to be learnt by all scriptwriters aiming to please the professions inspiring their series. I don't mind being laughed at, but I'd prefer to be depicted as sensitive, good-looking, self-aware, confident and bloody good at my job in the process. Of course, a Mills and Boon medical romance (paperback, at a supermarket near you) will also do this rather nicely but ever since I read about the doctor who stood alluringly, his "stethoscope mingling with his chest hair", I've been unable to take them seriously or at least, no more seriously than Casualty, which in turn I can only take seriously with a bottle of tequila.