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Last night's TV: Harley Street

Forget the NHS - Harley Street is far more glamorous. It's a shame it's also entirely soulless
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Harley Street
'There are lots of handsome ladies about the place; handsome Dr Fielding often ends up naked with them' ... Harley Street (ITV1)

Toffs used to have to keep quiet about being toffs - dress down and keep their heads down, estuarise their vowel sounds. Now, in these post-Alastair Campbell days, they're braying from the rooftops. Two out of three political parties - plus London - have Hooray Henrys at the helm. Then on telly there's Trinny, Susannah, Ladette to Lady, an Etonian starring in The Wire, Lucinda in The Apprentice ... see what I mean? And now here's Harley Street (ITV1). Ten years ago, you'd never have got a prime-time series commissioned about private medicine. What next? Grange Hill is reborn at Harrow? Prime-time polo on Sky Sports? CrouchEnders?

Maybe it's just a way of getting yet another medical drama on to the telly, because everyone loves a doc show, just as everyone loves a cop show. And everything else has been covered - inner-city A&E, country practices, plastic surgery, animal doctors. Harley Street is all there is left.

Actually, it starts in a busy south London NHS hospital, because handsome Dr Robert Fielding, played by Paul Nicholls, has a conscience, and wants to honour his debt to the taxpayer for putting him through medical school. It's bedlam in there - chaotic, under-resourced, overstretched, with gunshot victims, shouting, waiting lists, police and lots of noise. Holby, basically. But then, at the end of his night shift at the hospital, Dr Fielding steps into his silver Audi and speeds across town to London W1. He showers, symbolically washing away the muck, the smell and the ugliness of the NHS, then emerges, naked and dripping, to be greeted by his handsome partner Dr Martha Elliot, played by Suranne Jones.

And that's how it goes. There are lots of handsome ladies about the place; handsome Dr Fielding often ends up naked with them. I've never been to Harley Street, but if this is what it's really like, then it looks brilliant. The docs don't just give you hours of their time and sort out your health, they will also become your friend, lend a shoulder to cry on, give you Botox, sleep with you if that's what you want. Everyone wears excellent and expensive-looking underwear, the sort of underwear that is designed to come off quickly. There are no drunks, screaming babies, language problems, bad-tempered receptionists, or long waits. It's nothing at all like the general practice I go to. I need to get rich and go to Harley Street.

This is not excellent drama, though. It certainly doesn't convince: its attempts at real issues are laughable (even mental illness has to be given the glam treatment - so the manic depressive is also a celebrity chef). There's no one you really care about, no one whose pain you share. But then nor is it Footballers' Wives - knowingly ridiculous and funny. It's froth without the fun, lacking humour and soul; but then it sold its own soul by going private. I'll check in for one more appointment, and if there's no improvement after that, I'm going back to Casualty, Holby and the NHS.

Look! More evidence for my posh-being-acceptable theory, in Redgrave's Raw Recruits (ITV4). Sir Steve, our greatest-ever Olympian as we're always reminded, has been given a bunch of Scouse scallies to teach how to row, and then take to the nobbiest sporting event of all: Henley Royal Regatta. OK yaaah, Pimm's anyone? Calm down, calm down. The poshification of Britain continues.

Except that, this time, it doesn't. Filming on this show began back in 2005; it was due to be screened on ITV1 ages ago, but then it was shelved. Could this have something to do with the fact that Sir Steve's Liverpool eight failed to qualify for the posh regatta? It makes a bit of a mockery of so-called reality TV if the shows only get screened when they follow the script.

I'm glad there's been a (very) late change of heart, even if it has been confined to the backwater of ITV4. The kids are great and there are lots of moving and inspirational moments. So what if they didn't make it to Henley? Maybe it's OK not to be posh, after all.

And now I want to see a follow-up show. Take the committee of the Leander Club, Henley's grandest rowing establishment, and send them to live on a Toxteth estate for a year. Blazers are to be replaced with hoodies, labradors with fighting dogs, Pimm's with pills. And if they don't all end up on drugs, or dead, or in jail for thieving cars, then it doesn't matter. Someone will get something out of it. The telly bosses can dilly-dally for a long time, and then put it out on ITV4.

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