Getting On: Series 1 [DVD] [2009]

The entire first series of the BBC medical sitcom following the fortunes of the staff on an NHS hospital ward. Beset by killer viruses, egomaniacal consultants and endless paperwork, the overworked and underpaid staff of ward B4 struggle on regardless. Snowed under by her workload, neurotic Ward Sister Flixter (Joanna Scanlan) is forced to rely on the talents of seen-it-all-before nurse Kim Wilde (Jo Brand), while trying to avoid the attentions of over-egging Ward Doctor Pippa Moore (Vicki Pepperdine).
A pitch-black hospital comedy emerging from the mire of the mundanity, bureaucracy and absurdity of health care with warmth, wit and laughter.
Ward B4 is a backwater of an NHS hospital – a depository for dying and discombobulated geriatric women. Beset by C. diff, form-filling and self-obsessed consultants, the minimal staff struggle with the daily grind – blithely enduring the absurd hurdles and obstacles of the system and getting through each day on cake and cigarettes. Sister Flixter is in charge of the ward, but drowning in paperwork, neuroses and relationship issues, she relies on the graft and common sense of return-to-practice nurse Kim Wilde, the lowest form of life on the ward – after the lino. The patients, of course, are the least of their problems, especially compared to the jargon-fueled, stool-obsessed, ward doctor, Pippa Moore, and a new male matron who is determined to do things by the book.
“piercingly weird, coldly plausible, heartbreaking and hilarious.”–The Times “bleak but brilliant” Metro “relentlessly funny” The Mirror “Moving, darkly funny and truthful in the way that it skewers the ludicrous, labyrinthine bureaucracy… Unmissable” The Guardian