So, here it is. Portishead’s new album is finally here, and it’s a stunner. They’ve done something technically brilliant that not all of their long term fans will appreciate. Identified with the triphop sound they helped to pioneer way back when, they’ve come back having reinvented their approach to music. Everything is different when you pay close attention, still creating the same kind of emotional impact they’ve always excelled at, prompting melancholy and regret through conjuring memories that, while listening, you fail to realise aren’t your own.

The soundscape of the new album, Third, is comprised of elements unlike anything you’ll have heard from them up to this point. No lazy beats and John Barry-isms here; instead you’ll find acoustic guitar, bassoon, clarinet and hurdy gurdy, as well as a range of blue-grey moods conveyed with more conventional instruments. It’s bravura stuff, as convincing as it is compelling, an object lesson in reinvention for practitioners of any art form.

Which brings us on to Holby City. I’ve become pretty partial to this show in the last couple of years, and for me it’s a far more enticing prospect than Casualty. A hairdresser I visited ably described Casualty’s problem when she described a typical episode as ‘Someone gives birth, someone gets married, and someone pops their clogs’. That transparent A/B/C storylining is not nearly as obvious in its sister show, and Holby City is all the better for it.

Last night’s episode, written by Matthew Evans, was a good example of how to write quality medical drama. The big story was the reappearance of contentious character Abra Durant, returned from Africa via a Holby bar with a bloodied head and picking up his grievances with colleague Ric Griffin where they’d left them months before. Adeptly done, and with a lightness of touch that sidestepped on-the-nose confrontation in favour of more nuanced scenes.

Overall, the ongoing elements of the show were stronger than the two self-contained storylines. One concerned a harried church worker who was being overworked by a vicar, or at least that’s the way it looked until it turned out the vicar knew exactly what buttons to press to get his assistant to take a break away from God’s affairs and pay attention to her own. The other featured a squabbling couple who were brought together again when it looked like one of them might not live. And, err, that was it.

The other, more interesting, storyline featured Jane Asher as Lady Byrne, the hospital’s in-house aristo, arranging a photo-shoot for a charity she was a patron of. Cue a fun filmic sequence in which various female nurses auditioned for the gig before some stitching up was done to secure it for Daisha, who really did need the money from the photo shoot to give to her mother.

All good stuff, basically, and because it was well written and directed it was easy to forget we were cycling between the same few characters and stories: when you’re immersed in the story and not noticing the technical aspects, then one or more people are doing the right thing. Which is something that Portishead and Holby City, both born in Bristol, have in common.