The box set arrived Monday and I watched all sixteen episodes over the course of the last three evenings. And, as usual, it was utterly entrancing and remains the most consistently entertaining TV there is. I start to understand, dimly, how people can become hooked on soaps and lose perspective as I find it very easy to immerse myself in the characters, as if they are old friends who you have invited round for a few days and then they are gone for another year. I couldn’t invest the emotional attachment that I feel when watching the episodes back to back if it was just a weekly drizzle, I need to binge and it’s bliss. Until you get to the last episode and then they are gone for another year, but what a parting it was this season! The final episode was remarkable even amongst the stellar episodes of this and previous series, it produced a satisfactory conclusion but also presaged, what would appear to be inevitable, fall-out in Season 5. Maybe the medical fraternity think the whole thing is a bunch of arse if the medical basis for the stories is flawed, I have no idea about the licence taken with the medical conditions being treated, and I so don’t care. It’s about the people, the people who are ill, the people who are treating the ill people, the people who have a foot in both camps, the people who care and those who don’t care, or do they? It’s so difficult to quantify the huge appear of this series of programs without resorting to psychobabble, which I wish to avoid at all costs, so I won’t attempt to, suffice to say that, given the time, I would have happily sat down and watched every episode. No food, no sleep, a few cigarettes and the occasional coffee.
I will probably start with Series 1 again tonight, I can’t go cold turkey on this stuff.