Quiet and mean

BBC2’s Nurse Jackie is a great character. ‘Quiet and mean. Those are my people,’ she tells awkward junior nurse Zoe. Under the guise of quietness and meanness, and for all her caning of prescription medication and extra-marital sex with the hospital pharmacist, Jackie is unfailingly efficient, dryly witty and carries out so many acts of kindness and mercy – and retribution, that might be seen as divine, such as when she flushed the ear of a sadist who had tortured a woman down the lavatory - that AA Gill wrote in last weekend’s Sunday Times that she could be seen as a very contemporary kind of saint.
Now, surely, competence and humanity are what we expect from the medical profession, not solely the attributes of saintliness? But Jackie, who doesn’t have to make nice to be nice, is less urban Mother Teresa and more like a fairy tale character who waves a magic stethoscope and transforms the lives of those who are fortunate enough to come under her care. Florence Nightingale, who was famously forthright, would undoubtedly approve of the way her profession is being represented in the modern media, though she might wish there were enough money to provide properly for all the overstretched and underpaid true-life Jackies doing their best on the frontline of the NHS. Jackie is make-believe: a wish come true; a fairy godmother in scrubs at a time when in real hospitals in real places, pensioners are left in corridors to die on trolleys.