It'll fracture your funnybone !
1959-01-30
N/A
86 min
Set in Haven Hospital where a certain men's ward is causing more havoc than the whole hospital put together. The formidable Matron's debut gives the patients a chill every time she walks past, with only Reckitt standing up to her. There's a colonel who is a constant nuisance, a bumbling nurse, a romance between Ted York and Nurse Denton, and Bell who wants his bunion removed straight away, so after drinking alcohol, the men decide to remove the bunion themselves!
Hattie Jacques rules the nurses with a rod of iron as the matron; Wilfred Hyde-White has them all dancing to his tune as the "Colonel" and the rest of patients seem to be in far more danger inside this ward in the "Haven Hospital" than they might be outside walking down the motorway! Things lurch from minor disaster to minor disaster until "Jack" (Leslie Phillips) has to have his bunion operation deferred. He has other, urgent, plans and after a few glasses of bubbly the patients decide that this surgery is a dawdle, take over a theatre in the dead of night and attempt to remove it themselves! Enough to make your eyes water! Jacques was always in her element as the authoritarian figure and there are some fun pranks afoot to get revenge for her ruthlessness from both the poorly folks and from her put-upon nursing staff too. The humour is simple, there's a touch of slapstick and even a wee bit of romance - as well as some over sterilised catheter tubes and plenty of quirky character-driven sub-plots to give each of the cast their moment in the sun. Not my favourite, it's a bit too obvious much of the time - but it's still watchable if you get into the (surgical) spirit of the thing.
