Whole Lotte mess for our maniacal medics

CHANNEL 4's The Couple Next Door paints a shabby picture of NHS medical staff.

- with GARRY BUSHELL

When they're not strung out on meds, they're enjoying threesomes with hot Norwegian nurses. And junior doctors want another pay rise? Ye Gods, they're living in a pill-popping, soft-porn paradise. Sir Lancelot Spratt would hit the roof.

But of course, little about the series is believable.

Take Jacob, the consultant anaesthetist married to heart surgeon Lotte - the couple who smouldering nurse Mia seduced (what a Lotte he gotte).

The deranged plot had him accidently kill a patient by giving him potassium too late, and frame Mia for it.

He then made it look like another patient's death was connected, making Mia the chief suspect. Matron had seen her almost administer morphine to the father of Leo (Lotte's ex) and Jacob planted prescription drugs in her locker.

When Lotte discovered he had tampered with the medical records, Jacob did what any loving hubby would do - he laced her coffee with morphine and left her to die in the new hospital wing (oddly devoid of building workers). He then faked her suicide note, having Lotte confess that she'd covered up for Mia by altering records after falling under her sultry spell.

Ah, but Norwegian Mia was actually Polish Kasia whose criminal parents were arrested when she was 16 (hence her precious box of stolen Euros).