Last night’s Holby City was probably the worst soap drama episode I have ever seen on BBC television. It was worse than the worst ever episode of Eastenders, much worse than the pilot episode of Compact, and far, far worse than anything ever served up in The Grove Family.

There were two reasons why it plumbed the sort of depths normally only seen by those inside a bathyscape. The lesser and first of these was the inability of anyone in the cast to speak a line of dialogue without making the viewer think, “This is an appallingly wood-and-stone person trying to suggest he/she can act and thus make me forget that he/she is an appallingly wood-and-stone person”. The second and infinitely more damning reason was the dialogue….alongside which on the scaffold must be the situations inspiring the script in the first place.

A teenage patient arrived with her face in a mess, having stolen her mum’s car and totalled it. The male nurse donated a three-year course of psychoanalysis in under three minutes, after which mum came in. “It’s not the same without Dad” the heavily stitched daughter observed. “Yes….I know” said mum, “Should we try again?”. I wanted to kill both of them.

A young girl was an emergency. She had been vomitting too much, and thus fractured an aortic vein. “You aren’t……bulimic are you?” asked a nurse. “Nononnonononononoooo” said the patient. “Yes you are – I’ve seen you” said the patient’s girlie partner. “It’s your fault!” the victim screamed, “You so controlling!” I wanted to kill the writer.

I could let these vignettes off lightly and say they were didactic. I could be kind and say they were too bad for even an early Michael Winner public information film. Or I could do my job and say that we need to blow up the BBC drama department.

It was a truly barrel-scraping hour of television during which none of the normal expectations – interest, pathos, suspension of disbelief, tension, involvement or enjoyment – were present. And trust me, if the Tory Party thinks the way to solve this creative aridity is to expose the BBC to market forces, then it must be a bulimic mixed-up teenager suffering from the delusion that it has access to writers.