The thing that always used to bother me about M*A*S*H as a child was the lack of combat. You’d see the realistic film of choppers at the beginning and, obviously, the plotline would quite often include casualties coming in from recent scenes of action. But the exciting stuff always seemed to happen offstage, a bit like in Shakespeare where some character strides on and tells you what a terrible battle there’s just been and you’re going, ‘Wait a second. Did we just skip past the most exciting bit?’
This clearly isn’t going to be a problem, though, with BBC3’s new sitcom about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan, Bluestone 42 (Tuesday). Within the first five minutes, one of the characters had been shot dead through the head, after which there was a brisk firefight culminating in the total eradication of the Taleban position with a LAW rocket. In next week’s episode we see another Taleban being taken out with an automatic rifle. Dad’s Army it ain’t.
But is that a good thing? As yet, I can’t make up my mind. The point about all the really great sitcoms is that the settings are just a pretext: M*A*S*H could just as well have been in Vietnam rather than Korea, or in a busy LA hospital, or in a fire station or a colony on Mars. The humour had much more to do with the characters and their relationships than with location or grimy verisimilitude.
Indeed, too much of the latter might have killed it stone-dead. A scene, say, where the unit gets overrun by North Koreans and the wounded all get murdered on their stretchers, Father Mulcahy is crucified and Hawkeye, Trapper and Houlihan are tied to a wall and used for bayonet practice: try wringing some laughs out of that.
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