Balls on Sunday

BBC1 on a Sunday. Hope Springs followed by Casualty 1909. One is a hilarious and far-fetched comedy drama with some of the funniest performances on television, and the other is a disturbing look into the primitive dilemmas of an almost unrecognisable age. Sadly they're not the way round the makers would have wanted.

Hope Springs thinks it's an outrageously funny and twisty-turny contemporary comedy thriller, but is in fact a pointless mess wasting the talents of a great cast playing characters who are utterly unlike real people. I really wanted to like it, because the idea of a prime-time comedy thriller in the tradition of Hamish Macbeth starring Jamie from The Thick of It really appealed, but there's no tension and none of it is remotely believable. It's like a League of Gentlemen side project remade by Hollyoaks.

Casualty 1909 returns the serve of ITVs The Royal Today, only to watch it fly screaming over the heads of the crowd due to the hilarious histrionics of the actors and the clunking schools television issues and lessons of the ridiculous script. Every effort has been made to represent 1909 as exactly the same as 2009 but with cholera and pillbox hats. The female characters are so absurdly modern that you can't imagine suffrage or feminism were ever necessary, so equal are they to the men in the hospital. Mr Dean, the coke-addled evil head doctor, is just absurd: he's part Johnny Depp in From Hell, part Paul Whitehouse in the Fast Show saying 'me, in a hospital full of nurses, with my reputation?'. This week the coked up young ham manages to turn a simple testicular operation into a gangrenous amputation thanks to the use of a now-banned anaesthetic called stovane. Good subject for drama, but sadly in context of this show the lesson felt as easy to take as the dangerous anesthetic. How We Used To Live, the brilliant schools history programme that ran for over decade, was much creakier – I cannot fault the production values of Casualty 1909, which go a long way to hide its many faults – but then HWYTL was made at a fraction of the cost and the cynicism.