Bodies (BBC3)

The Rise Of The Celebrity Class (BBC2)

Experience tells you that any new TV medical drama won't illustrate how well our health service is working.

Bodies doesn't disappoint in that respect. Halfway through we'd witnessed two deaths from medical incompetence and a gynecology department where labour with a small l was as hard as life is for Labour with a big L at the moment.

You'd expect no more from Jed Mercurio, a former doctor who also wrote Cardiac Arrest, that grim and gritty account of medical life that introduced Helen Baxendale to our screens. Bodies, based on his novel, is developing into something very dark and strange.

New registrar Rob Lake (Max Beesley) is growing increasingly aware that his boss doesn't know what he's doing as he's been appointed on his research rather than his surgical skills.

In addition, the staff seem more preoccupied with their own lives than those of their patients. One woman is moved to the top of the operating list; unfortunately the procedure she's to undergo isn't moved with her. As a result, a woman desperate to get pregnant comes within a whisker of being sterilised.

Like other errors, this can be covered up by being put down to "a tragic accident where no one is to blame".

A dying patient is turned down because it would spoil a consultant's mortality figures. "She's deader than Elvis, I'm not having her peg out under me," he says uncaringly.

Patients who have the audacity to die too quickly after an operation are criticised too - "if she lives 30 days she won't appear in the figures".

In between searching for a lost condom (don't ask where it's gone missing) and having rough sex with a married nurse, Lake attempts his first tracheotomy. It is not a success. Relatives can't understand why as they've seen it done on telly and it looks easy.

Lake sees his boss as supportive and a good guy. A more experienced nurse disagrees: "He may be a good guy, he's just not that good a doctor."

The series is debuting on BBC3 before showing on BBC2 later in the year, but anyone going into hospital is advised not to watch. Bodies should carry a health warning.

Celebrities are the new artistocracy is the premise of new documentary series, The Rise Of The Celebrity Class. The problem is that the new elite class isn't groomed in how to handle fame, fortune and media attention. All too often the massive life change leads to excessive behaviour - drink, drugs, sex, spending - and a fall from grace.

Martin Sheen, currently riding high as the President in TV's The West Wing, has been there and done that. He talks intelligently of fame as being both a curse and a blessing. "It's very difficult to be yourself when there's an image to live up to," he says.

Brett Anderson, from Suede, compared fame to being excluded from a club for years and then being made president. Waking up in paradise was very exciting, he admitted, although you were cut off from the rest of the world.

It was also explained why the famous tend to share their lives with other famous people. Non-celebrities tend to kiss and tell. But as Frank Skinner put it: "If I have sex with Princess Stephanie of Monaco, she's not going to go to the papers".