Holby City: The girl’s wired

(Series 16, ep. 52) These Holby wet labs are entirely unregulated. If you want to appropriate one for your own personal use and stick post it notes all over it and have a prog rock freak-out, then go ahead. That’s what it’s there for, and that’s where Dr Digby found Zosia, full of manic energy and having worked out the secret to something or other that will surely see her as cover star of the Lancet sometime soon. If they have cover stars.  

Her behaviour round patients (and colleagues) was as confrontational and bizarre as ever. She’s been getting away with it, but not this time. The patient was Colette’s old mate Sophie, and while Sophie was blonde, she was most certainly not Blonde. “Can’t you see there’s something wrong with her?” she said to Colette. “The girl’s wired.” Sophie had a brain problem, which is Selfie’s area of expertise, but Sophie was wary of letting him operate on her. “You can’t even see your own daughter’s running wild and you want me to trust me with your life?” This is the kind of truth-saying that Holby could do with more of (I can just imagine what Dr Frieda Petrenko would have made of Zosia. And, indeed, Selfie). Sophie even identified that Colette is in love with the charm-free CEO, despite Colette having spent the last several weeks flirting with Fletch.

Was it her love of Selfie that made Colette substitute her own blood for Zosia’s when a drugs test was needed? Digby and Dominic finally ’fessed up about the time Zosia overdosed, and in a tearful encounter on one of Holby’s many mysterious outdoor walkways, Zosia admitted to Colette that she’d taken an enlivener the evening before. I can’t help thinking Colette’s actions were seriously misguided (or mis-Guy-ded) and it’s all going to come back to bite her. Guy is still in denial about his daughter’s health and despite Colette’s efforts he literally shut her out of the charmed axis that is the Family Self.

Someone else who was getting doors shut in her face, though more metaphorically this time, was Jac Naylor in her attempts to hold out an olive branch to Prof Hope. He was all excited about a new invention. It’s not another Herzig, it’s something quite new, and he wants to keep Jac’s “grubby little fingers” off it. I’m sure she was trying to help rather than steal it when she told Selfie about it, and he agreed to let Elliot present a proposal for funding to him. Elliot, however, has his New Bezzie Mate, the ever-present Adele. As soon as she was finished serving breakfasts, she was apparently free for the rest of the day to hover around the Prof, bolstering his ego, calling in favours from a range of expert mates and revealing pitching skills that would have Duncan Bannatyne reaching for his wallet if she was to ever go on Dragons’ Den, and negotiation skills that would have Lord Sugar telling her she was hired. “I have a valve replacement at six. Perhaps you’d like to have a go at that, too,” sighed Jac.

Two good things to report about AAU. The first was a very nice mention of Jeff, who perished so spectacularly a couple of days ago on Casualty. Harry gave his condolences to Fletch, who of course worked with Jeff for a long time. I do like it when we get glimpses that it’s all the same hospital really. And I do miss Jeff.

The other lovely thing was the return of the magnificent Mary-Claire, who’d hardly set foot on the ward before she’d worked out the whole Smug/Posh/Barf triangle, including pointing out to Harry that statistically it was much more likely that the baby was his. This prompted him to run off and tell Dr Amy Teo that he wanted a DNA test to find out if the baby might be a little bit Posh.

And that, dear readers, concludes Series 16. It’s been a roller-coaster ride, hasn’t it?

Next time: It’s Series 17 – and Michael Spence is back!

Advertorial PS – The episode was called True Colours, and I wrote a book called that.