“I knew on day one I’d found my place in the world,” came her disembodied narration. “Somewhere I belonged. This is what the NHS means to us. Not a badge on a cabinet minister’s lapel. Not a number down the side of a bus. It’s a nurse missing her break to sit with a lonely patient, a surgeon grinding out a 15-hour op, sirens, Thursday night applause floating through the air. It’s something to believe in. It’s home.”

There were other pointed digs at the Tories for underfunding and the proliferation of food banks but, frankly, by the closing credits only a churl could have failed to cheer Team Holby. Meanwhile there were satisfying rapprochements between patients and staff alike. An estranged brother was brought together with his sister after a bereavement that fractured their family. Henrik Hanssen (Guy Henry) hitched a ride to Leeds, felicitously with Jac’s corneas (the scales having finally fallen from his own eyes) where he was reunited with Russ, scrubbed and ready to operate, through a plate glass window.

Back on the wards of Holby, there were tears at Jac’s passing leavened by rueful humour. “She once told me I look like a big bag full of yoghurt,” smiled Sasha, sloshing as he spoke. “Paddington Bear with a stethoscope,” nodded Elliot. “A pound-shop Pearly King,” acknowledged Fletch.

Truthful if cruel. Much like Jac herself, the latest, last iteration of the classic trope that sees professional brilliance undermined by personal daemons. And even as her colleagues mourned, the calls came in, bleepers sounded and summoned. A major incident. A fleet of ambulances. Once again they rose to the occasion, striving to save lives – it’s what the NHS does.

Dignified, deeply moving and written with great mastery, this final Holby City leave-taking had all the heft of an ending without feeling like the end.