The National Health is a 1973 British black comedy film directed by Jack Gold and starring Lynn Redgrave, Colin Blakely and Eleanor Bron.

without the mayhem – an unsentimental, uncomfortably comic and barely exaggerated portrayal of British welfare medicine, the most well-meaning on earth, but dispiritingly undermanned, depersonalised, and bogged down in bedpans and logistics.

The only reminder, in fact, that the nearest one usually gets to this kind of comment is Carry On Nurse is the presence of Jim Dale, though that is meant to be far from disparaging: he all but steals the picture with his portrait of cheerfully cynical vulgarity, relishing Nichols' best lines ("One slip", he quips as he shaves a patient in preparation for an abdominal operation, "and Bob's your auntie!")

The acting throughout is flawless, with perhaps the best moments provided by Clive Swift's basket-weaving ulcer victim, Colin Blakely's grumbling amnesiac, Lynn Redgrave's devoted, put-upon nurse, and Donald Sinden – in one of several double cameos – as a brash consultant ("Your bum any better ?")

"[5] Leslie Halliwell said: "Acerbic comedy from a National Theatre play which mixes tragedy and farce into a kind of Carry on Dying.