A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In Charge - Shut Up & Eat What You're Given (13 August 1972)

 There is no scene in any drama set at a mealtime that cannot be improved by making some reference to what the characters are eating. It's almost the only activity that can be shown on screen that everybody watching has an active interest in, and imagining the taste and texture of the food consumed encourages an easy empathetic understanding of something of what the characters are feeling at the moment.
 

 So an episode about hospital food was always going to be onto something of a winner, and this one does what you'd hope of it, with charred sausages flying off plates, etc. The doctors' canteen is a worryingly insanitary place, where dinner ladies cough all over the food and cooks reheat what gets left over in perpetuity. The only thing that it has going for it is that a three course meal costs 12 1/2p there, £1.69 in today's money.
 

 Two other sorts of food offset the unappetising canteen stodge. There is delicious food, such as the joint of beef and roast potatoes which Professor Loftus temps the dieting doctors with, and a fascinating replacement menu when the canteen offers alternative fare - asparagus soup, prawn cocktails, steaks and creme caramel. A three course meal of this calibre costs Doctor Waring £1.25 (£16.20 today).
 

 Some research has gone into the third cuisine, with Waring evangelising about trendy macrobiotics, and recruiting Collier into sharing his new diet with him. The food that they eat (millet spaghetti and seaweed) is harder to imagine the taste of. You get the feeling that Jonathan Lynn is presenting his research findings to the viewer here in a way that pre-empts his Yes Minister work, especially when Waring and Collier contract scurvy through Vitamin C deficiency, not an immediately obvious comedy consequence.