Holby City...

I watched two episodes of Holby City over the weekend. It's not a show I'd ever heard of, until Peter Wingfield got a role in it, and suddenly it burst onto my radar in a blaze of light. Peter Wingfield is one of the stars in my firmament. He is most famous in fandom for playing Methos in Highlander, if you don't know.

So: Holby City is a medical show, and I'm not big on medical shows because I'm squeamish. And this show, like so many others, took delight in showing us bloody details of the operations. For half an hour or so, I flinched and hid my eyes. Then I started getting used to it and just sort of... disengaging on those bits.

Peter Wingfield plays Dan Clifford, the new surgeon who waltzes into the hospital in his Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirt, because he's just back from a golfing holiday and the airline misplaced his luggage. Turns out the holiday would have been his honeymoon, had he not just jilted his bride. At first Clifford seemed funny-but-obnoxious, but he became more and more endearing and by the end of the second episode I loved him: a smart, good-hearted activist with a secret agenda.

I want to see more. More, more.

Note: you may think the show was all about Dan Clifford, but it wasn't. That's my directed attention. My happy fixation with Wingfield. There are maybe half a dozen plots going on at once, all in varying degrees of outrageousness. Between pig-kidney transplants, shootings in supermarkets, and kidnapped children, I'm not sure Holby City is a safe place to live.