It is 12.50pm on an overcast Tuesday and Alice and Pat are waiting in a corridor in King's College Hospital. Pat, 78, has broken her arm; elder sister Alice is there to offer support while grumbling about the weight of Pat's handbag ("what you got in 'ere, a bomb?"). A nurse approaches with a smile and a kidney dish.
"She loves Johnny Depp," says Alice, as sleeves are rolled up and curtains drawn. Pat nods and pats her curls. "I've got a photo of him just above my oven. I think of myself as Angelina Jolly."
24 Hours in A&E (Channel 4) is alive with such vignettes, its patchwork format – sporadic voiceover, talking heads, fleeting shots of overweight male nurses bending to retrieve bottles of Fanta from the staff snack dispenser etc – forming a vigorous, celebratory defence of the NHS. Unlike other observational series, there is never any attempt to judge or mock, nor is there the sense that we are expected to view unforeseen recoveries as miracles or the staff as ministering angels (as blunt consultant Firas puts it: "We are not magicians"). Instead, here is grief, heroism, stupidity, tragedy, bitterness, hilarity, frustration, compassion, tedium, selflessness, unexpected ringworm diagnoses and, in one gloriously surreal sequence, a man dressed as a giant coffee cup waddling unsteadily out of the exit, his virulent blue sponge shoes flapping.
The result is a fanfare for the common man, albeit a fanfare played on abandoned tracheal tubes as a yawning porter trundles past reception with an understocked snack trolley. Brilliant.
No such dramas for Two Greedy Italians, whose amiable phut-phut around Italy's gastronomic B-roads continued on BBC2. This week, the duo's vintage hire car chugged into Piemonte, an area where, Antonio Carluccio explained, "traditional beliefs are being challenged by new, modern cultures and food-ah." And what food-ah. There were enormous truffles and sunken cheeses; battered frogs and sausages the size of campaniles. In Turin, they headed to a restaurant to harrumph over the latest fusion cuisine. A young chef served a Thai-inspired risotto prepared with miso soup. Forks were raised to wary mouths. The camera hovered expectantly. "This is no risotto," said Gennaro Contaldo, wincing. "Ees nice, but don't call it Italian food," added Carluccio as the chef's smile wilted like hot spinach.
At heart, Two Greedy Italians is a culinary buddy caper – a sort of ricotta-stuffed Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure, or, if you can stomach the image, the Hairy Bikers in billowing linen slacks. Its most obvious appeal is its fusion of scenery and nostalgia – its two elderly amici reminiscing about past glories, interspersing undemanding cooking sessions in sun-bleached vineyards with bouts of allegedly spontaneous japery as they throw their mottled hands up in (semi-serious) horror at the changes that have befallen their country since they left for Britain 40 years ago.
And yet there is a bluebottle in the bolognese. And that bluebottle is Contaldo. Given his comparatively high energy levels, the younger chef has inevitably been cast as the class clown – the bell-jingling jester to Carluccio's slow-moving, spherical sage. But Contaldo is not the irrepressible wag the producers have cast him as. He's not even James May. He's just a close-talking Italian who can't speak without bobbing up and down – a habit that makes him look as if he is permanently in the process of inflating an offscreen bouncy castle with his sandal.
Nevertheless, the "this man is funny" image persists, and so we were forced to watch him pedal around endlessly on a rickety bicycle. There was a bit where he tormented his old friend with an umbrella, while Carluccio responded in the manner of an ancient St Bernard patiently indulging a bothersome toddler ("yes, yes . . . "). And there was the obligatory Putatively Amusing and in No Way Stage-Managed Tomato Incident, which this week involved Contaldo throwing tomatoes into the air while Carluccio pretended not to know where they were coming from.
It's all wildly unnecessary, particularly as the Carluccio-only segments are often genuinely affecting, not least when he told us about the death of his young brother in 1960 – an event that inspired his belief in cooking as therapy. But then it was back to Contaldo arsing around on his bicycle.
Best just to ignore him and enjoy the tomatoes.
