An essential part is the reaction of Jerry, Brenton's father, who has to wait anxiously while the wife and son simultaneously go under the knife.Both producers set out with preconceived ideas about how the subjects would react to being filmed; and both were proved wrong. Jane Merkin went to Philadelphia thinking that Americans would be used to television cameras and would not mind having a film crew in the emergency room. Not so."A lot of their experience around hospitals is the ambulance-chasing news crews. The staff were very open and willing, but it was much harder than I expected to film other people." In the end, once they had explained that what they were doing was not exploitative, they were usually given permission, although they were refused in all but one trauma case.For the film crew "being British helped enormously". Foreigners, too, have their preconceptions.In St Petersburg, on the other hand, Sarah Neale found a quite different situation.

Patients may stay a long time in the Regional Children's Hospital - "average stays are three times as long as here" - and since it serves quite a large area of countryside around the city, their parents may have to travel for two hours to visit them. "A lot of children are left to their own devices in hospital and it's quite boring. There are not a lot of nurses to give emotional support and they have to deal with quite complicated procedures on their own." In the circumstances, most of the patients were only too pleased to have the distraction.Of course the films are intended as a pair and meant to offer a contrast. In Philadelphia we have state-of-the-art equipment, well-regulated procedures and staff who could have walked off the set of ER. In St Petersburg, the buildings are dilapidated, the doctors grossly underpaid, the medicine cupboard empty and the borsch served in huge metal buckets; a boy with spinal injuries has to be transported 20 miles across a road full of potholes in an ambulance seriously lacking in suspension.And the contrasts extend to the films themselves: while Philadelphia has Andrew Sachs' voiceover as a commentary, in St Petersburg we get jolly Jeremy Sprake talking to camera. And, like the hospital it shows, the Philadelphia film seems to run smoothly, while the St Petersburg one has a more artless feel It also has the undisguised message.

A junior doctor earning 600 roubles (about 24 dollars) a month quotes a friend as telling her: "Six years from now, it won't matter how much you had in your bank account, but the world will be a little better if you have saved the life of a child." No doubt there are junior doctors in Philadelphia who feel the same about their vocation, but they would hardly say that on camera M.A.S.H. and ER have taught them the busy-but-cynical look that a properly laid-back and fully-in-control doctor is supposed to adopt on TV.. THE SPEAKERS 1 KATE CLANCHY Poet and presenter1 MICHAEL DONAGHYPoetKATE CLANCHY: Bereavement is a time when many people reach for poetry - whether to read or write it Today we will be considering twopoems about bereavement. The first is a classic lyric of love for a lost friend written 150 years ago.

Then we'll look at a new poem about grieving for a mother and father. The classic lyric is part of In Memoriam, by Tennyson.Tennyson wrote In Memoriam for his friend Arthur Hallam, who died shockingly young, but when the poem was first published in the mid-19th century it was staggeringly popular, selling thousands upon thousands of copies, as though Tennyson, out of his own loss, had found a voice for many other bereaved people of the Victorian age. It still speaks clearly today.In Memoriam is a long sequence of verses that takes us through grief and the loss of religious faith to restored hope. But we've chosen one small section from the early part of the poem. The narrator can't sleep, and just before dawn he returns to the house where, in happier times, his friend would be waiting to greet him.Dark house, by which once more I standHere in the long unlovely street,Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand,A hand that can be clasp'd no more -Behold me, for I cannot sleep,And like a guilty thing I creepAt earliest morning to the door.He is not here; but far awayThe noise of life begins again,And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.We asked the Irish-American poet Michael Donaghy to talk about In Memoriam, and then to write a poem of his own in response.Michael Donaghy's poetry is often concerned with bereavement, with finding the right words for loss.