The Mail on Sunday- February 27, 2000

Right. This time, I tried; I really tried. Honestly.

I squinted at the screen, jumped up and down, stood on my head, threw pizza at the television, and still I couldn’t get an expression on Gary Mavers’s face.

Mavers is the man who plays Peak Practice’s Dr Andrew Attwood, a character who never smiles, never moves his jaw, and delivers his lines with an affected intensity that makes him look as if he’s praying for a lavatory break.

This week, Mavers turned up in Blue Murder, a one-off, two-hour drama, in which he was playing a cop called Adam, who never smiled, never moved his jaw etc, etc. He killed his lover’s husband Ben (Tim Woodward) and then had to investigate the murder with a too-clever-by-half sidekick who also had the hots for him.

It was dreadful. No. That’s not fair.

It was appalling. It was also incomprehensible.

I think that Gail (Gemma Redgrave – what was she doing in this dross?) turned out not to be Gail, and Adam was stabbed.

Or was that just wishful thinking?

It’s not often I feel angry for having wasted two hours of my life, but an orang-utan brandishing a blunt chainsaw could have made a better job of editing this into something mildly watchable. Even the sex acts looked as if they were being performed by people in the first stages of rigor mortis.

Encouraging Adam to shoot Ben again, Gail had cried ‘Finish it!’ But I’d been crying that from the start.

Dr Nick Jordan (Michael French) is a great deal more charismatic than Andrew Attwood but he walked out of Holby City this week despite having been cleared in the hearing following a patient’s death.

This was one of Holby’s better episodes in a series that picked up hugely after Mike Barratt (Clive Mantle – the good looking one from Casualty) turned up.

My only worry is that the staff never have enough to do. In one scene, there were four of them wheeling a trolley; why they worried about an outbreak of diptheria when there was nobody around to catch it is a mystery.

On this evidence, funding for the NHS could be halved.

He’s very good at walking out, though, is Michael French. His face takes on a purposeful, fixed expression, and his eyes sparkle with optimism. When he left EastEnders, where he played David Wicks, his eyes were probably sparkling because he managed to dump Cindy at the last moment, and in Holby, he glowed as he drove away for good.

EastEnders hasn’t been the same since this charismatic actor left, and the 15th anniversary episode was evidence enough that the show is in desperate need of another maverick like him.