Harley Street (ITV1)

You can see why ITV wants to get us all excited about Harley Street. It’s a sexy address: the best plastic surgeons and private doctors on one street curing the ailments and servicing the vanities of the super-rich. There is so much right-on UK medical drama – quite right, we invented the NHS and all that – that surely it’s time to wallow a bit. If only we could have the courage to execute such a frivolous ambition.

The first stumbling block is Paul Nicholls as Dr Robert Fielding: it’s just really hard to buy Nicholls as a sexy chap who cannot progress down a corridor without nurses throwing themselves in his path like lovesick lemmings. He’s perfectly nice and everything but . . .

Robert works one shift at his local NHS hospital (good!), before throwing off his scrubs and putting on the Armani suit for some Harley Street action (boo, hiss – money, money, money, bad, bad, bad). Nicholls is handsome but he hasn’t got presence. His character is allegedly conflicted about private and public healthcare but that conflict doesn’t exactly hum from every pore. He doesn’t twinkle. Would he sexually charge you, or be a perfectly pleasant lunch companion?

He also has absolutely no chemistry with Suranne Jones, who played Karen McDonald, one of my all-time favourite Coronation Street banshees, but who here talks as if she has a plum in her mouth. Jones plays Martha, Robert’s Harley Street consulting partner. Naturally – this is stereotype central after all – Martha and Robert have an electric, unrequited flirtation; she is appalled but admiring at his seduction routine, but has a severe bob so says reproachful things about him being “committed” to the practice. The bob goes a bit wavy when she strokes her ickle daughter’s hair – yes, she’s a single mother.

Shaun Parkes plays the third of the Harley Street team – will he have the filler storyline every week? He spent the first episode trying to liberate a young woman from the grip of a rich moron who wanted her to have needless plastic surgery. In the background hovered the ex-EastEnders actress Kim Medcalf, playing a nice, mostly mute receptionist.

Quite apart from all these rackety, boring characters, Harley Street is far too low on fun. The main storyline of this opening episode – singularly failing to live up to all the sexy, dripping in diamonds, champagne and sex-sodden hype – was a miserable Casualty-ish offcut. Will Mellor played one half of a couple expecting a baby, except – in that coalescing just-when-you-thought-it-couldn’t-get-any-worse scenario – he was on lithium and thought she was having an affair, she had a medical condition but didn’t tell him, he walked out on her, she died after giving birth, he finally accepted their baby was his.

Too much misery. You want countesses getting their young gigolo’s sperm counted, or pop stars overdosing on Botox. The credits and the vibe of the show cock a snook to Footballers’ Wives, but Harley Street hasn’t got even a smidgeon of the latter’s outrageous DNA.

Do not prep the patient for surgery yet. There are promising signs: a sleazy doctor is trying to seduce Martha and Robert is already bonking the daughter of some rich bloke whose patronage he is seeking. But, oh no, misery alert: here comes Robert’s dad and he cares about the NHS, not this posh medicine nonsense. He’s gruff, of course, and inevitably from the North – so a thousand times more genuine and to be trusted than those lily-livered Londoners. Can he die of his renal thingummybob asap, and then can the corruption, bed-hopping and cocaine-spattered merriment really begin?

The Unseen Alistair Cooke (BBC Four)

You wanted to be beside Alistair Cooke on his amazing road trips across America, as captured in The Unseen Alistair Cooke. Super 8 and old cine film can convert even the most haggard or nondescript landscapes into flickering beauties. The mellifluous cragginess of Cooke, famous for Letter from America, played over the film; and his loved ones remembered him.

There was a surfeit of wonderful detail: Cooke’s close friendship with Charlie Chaplin, his presence, his love of jazz and his presence at Robert Kennedy’s assassination, where “the button eye of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders” while Kennedy lay dying “like the stone face of a child lying on a cathedral tomb”. A final carnival of flickering images, showing Cooke eating candyfloss, stretching and joshing with Chaplin was deployed by Rachel Jardine, the producer and director: a perfect memorial montage, both playful and intimate.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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