On TV

THE answer to the National Health Service's ills is at hand. Her name is Nurse Jeanette Dunkley, a modern day healer who's more Dr Crippen than Dr Kildare.

Supporters of Footballers' Wives will recall that she uses unorthodox, and often illegal, methods to cure the sick. Now she's back but in the even tackier spin-off, Footballers' Wives Extra Time.

This series isn't so much its brainy big brother as its slutty little sister. Nurse Dunkley was first seen stalking the wards where Ollie was on a life support machine. He survived an erotic encounter with a suction pump in the first series only to come a cropper in a car crash. She's by his bedside to comfort his lover Anika Beevor (and yes, there is an Eager Beevor joke coming up later in the series). She's been playing away with his father, Earls Park chairman Garry Ryan, but is now devoting all her attention to the comatose Ollie.

When she sees him twitch, Nurse Dunkley is there to explain that it's only IMS, which I thought was something in the financial world but turns out to be an Involuntary Muscle Spasm.

Anika is reminded that her half-sister, Footballers' Wives favourite Tanya Tucker, and the nurse "pulled off a little miracle" by bringing Tanya's husband Frank back from the brink. She omits to mention that they were the ones pushing him over it.

"Such a handsome young man, it would be a tragedy to just let him slip away," sighs Nurse Dunkley, pointing out that he'll need months of therapy and manipulation. He'll certainly need something after she's finished with him.

Tests on Ollie show no brain activity (nothing unusual there, then) but she applies her healing hands. Whipping back the sheets, she examines her subject and understands why Anika is desperate to bring him back. "You may have a brain like mashed potato but you're certainly not lacking in the sausage department," says Nurse Dunkley in the sort of line you never hear in Shakespeare.

Her treatment involves a lot of stroking and flicking with a rolled-up towel, a method the NHS might well adopt as it doesn't use expensive drugs and deplete funds.

It works and Ollie rises to the occasion. "Oh look, John Thomas popping up to say hello," observes Nurse Dunkley. She could probably raise the dead if she tried.

Extra Time also has something that Footballers' Wives rarely has - men playing football. The trouble is Seb Webb, relegated from the main team, is falling over. "On your feet Webb, this is a football pitch not the London Palladium," he's told.

Bad news for the Salter teenage children. They discover their mum was married to their dad after all. "So we never were bastards," says Rees. I wouldn't go that far, especially after his sex session in a car with Chanel O'Grady. Her approach to men doesn't smell so much of No 5 as Eau de Slapper. "The best way to get over one bloke is to get under another," she says.

September In The Rain,

York Theatre Royal Studio

NICHOLAS Lane's revival of John Godber's two-hander is pretty much a perfect piece of theatre - funny, warm and touching. The laughter of recognition echoing around the full house showed that this nostalgic, but not overly sentimental, recollection of trips to Blackpool by married couple Jack and Liz makes an instant connection with the audience.

Everyone can relate to their stories of seaside holidays - the horrendous car journey, the less-than-palatial digs, the arguments, the "I wish I'd never come here" moment, the paddling in the sea and, of course, the rain. Always the rain.

Godber has tapped into something everyone can recognise and spun it brilliantly together in a story played out on Catherine Chapman's simple but effective set with only a few chairs and suitcases as props.

Jack and Liz first go to Blackpool together on their honeymoon, returning time and again during their married life. We witness, through their eyes, not only the seaside town change over the years but also their shifting relationship as age intrudes on their life.

Lane's immaculate production emerges as both hilarious and touching with a pair of beautifully drawn portraits of the couple from Robert Angell and Fiona Wass. With a look here and a gesture there, they convey the warmth of a close-knit partnership that weathers rows and the rain year after year.

Until March 11. Tickets (01904) 623568.

Steve Pratt

Steptoe And Son In Murder At Oil Drum Lane, Comedy Theatre, London

EASTENDERS actress Barbara Windsor was in the front row, veteran actress June Whitfield was sitting a few rows behind. Comedy turns including Simon Day, Hattie Heyridge and Jerry Springer The Opera co-author Stewart Lee were in the audience. So was Have I Got News For You's Paul Merton, who'd already seen the show during its world premiere run in York last year.

Perhaps more surprising was the presence of actors David Warner, Michael Feast and director Ken Loach, better known for socially-alert film dramas like Cathy Come Home than TV sit-coms like Steptoe And Son. Perhaps they're closet Harold and Albert fans.

They all turned out for the first night of the new Steptoe And Son play - along with a party from York Theatre Royal, celebrating the venue's first ever London West End transfer.

The TV hit of the 1960s and 1970s has been revived on stage by Ray Galton (who wrote the original with Alan Simpson) and John Antrobus. Putting on the story of the rag-and-bone men without original stars Harry H Corbett and Wilfred Brambell might seem impossible but in Harry Dickman and Jake Nightingale they've found two actors who can convey the spirit of Albert and Harold without just doing slavish impressions in this potent mix of comedy and drama.

Harold returns to the scene of a crime - his old house, now owned by the National Trust. There, he killed his father, who was skewered by an asagai spear while sitting on the outdoor lavatory. He's been on the run in Rio and has returned home to flog his story to the papers and make a lot of money. But he's reckoned without the ghostly reappearance of "dirty old man" Albert.

There are still moments when this format looks contrived and the comedy tips over into total farce, but the constant tug between Harold and Albert ensures there's an edge to the comedy.

Steve Pratt