A really
interesting script from Graham Chapman and Bernard McKenna, in which Dr Upton
gets seconded to a psychiatric practice. There's ambivalence about the value
and use of psychiatry (which maybe comes from Chapman's own experience), which
says different things about the treatment with each successive patient.
The first patient is a council gardener with an embarrassing tic, another chance to utilize David Jason's abilities to grey up and play an old man and be physically funny. This patient is shown to be a sympathetic character that is capable of being cured, and whose life gets shown to be improved by the treatment. It's as though the programme feels a responsibility to present a positive depiction of psychiatry, to alleviate the anxieties viewers who may come into contact with the treatment and feel stigmatised by it.
Having got that out of the way, the second patient mainly serves the narrative comic function of showing Dr Upton having a go at psychiatry and initially not succeeding very well. Noel Coleman plays the imposing patient, and viewers who remember the 1969 Doctor Who story The War Games will recognise aspects of his performance as General Smythe being used again - especially when the patient wants to emphasise his authority to the Doctor and puts on a pair of glasses!
The final patient is an eminent psychiatrist (a Nobel Prize winner, we are told) played by Freddie Jones in deranged mode. The comedy here stems from a misunderstanding between who is the Doctor and who is the patient, and is sceptical about the value of the techniques that psychiatrists use. Despite the acting pedigree this bit isn't as funny, but compensatory interest comes from the sterling work of the LWT designers in imagining how this distinguished man might decorate his room and realising it in an audacious set. Sir Robert Joyce first appears sat at his desk, dwarfed by a terrifying, hideous, mural of a foetus in the womb, placed under a canopy of a sinister ghostly shroud against a Roger Dean-style backdrop of a fantastic landscape. The eminent psychiatrist's surgery also has exposed piping in green and pink, strange triangular criss-cross lighting on the ceiling and a psychedelic rainbow lighting cabinet of a type sometimes also seen on the set of Top Of The Pops around this time.
The first patient is a council gardener with an embarrassing tic, another chance to utilize David Jason's abilities to grey up and play an old man and be physically funny. This patient is shown to be a sympathetic character that is capable of being cured, and whose life gets shown to be improved by the treatment. It's as though the programme feels a responsibility to present a positive depiction of psychiatry, to alleviate the anxieties viewers who may come into contact with the treatment and feel stigmatised by it.
Having got that out of the way, the second patient mainly serves the narrative comic function of showing Dr Upton having a go at psychiatry and initially not succeeding very well. Noel Coleman plays the imposing patient, and viewers who remember the 1969 Doctor Who story The War Games will recognise aspects of his performance as General Smythe being used again - especially when the patient wants to emphasise his authority to the Doctor and puts on a pair of glasses!
The final patient is an eminent psychiatrist (a Nobel Prize winner, we are told) played by Freddie Jones in deranged mode. The comedy here stems from a misunderstanding between who is the Doctor and who is the patient, and is sceptical about the value of the techniques that psychiatrists use. Despite the acting pedigree this bit isn't as funny, but compensatory interest comes from the sterling work of the LWT designers in imagining how this distinguished man might decorate his room and realising it in an audacious set. Sir Robert Joyce first appears sat at his desk, dwarfed by a terrifying, hideous, mural of a foetus in the womb, placed under a canopy of a sinister ghostly shroud against a Roger Dean-style backdrop of a fantastic landscape. The eminent psychiatrist's surgery also has exposed piping in green and pink, strange triangular criss-cross lighting on the ceiling and a psychedelic rainbow lighting cabinet of a type sometimes also seen on the set of Top Of The Pops around this time.
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