A Comedy On this Day: Doctor In The House - A Stitch In Time (12 June 1970)

 This Garden & Oddie script does just the sort of things that you expect to see in a routine Doctor In The House episode. Upton and Waring do a stint on Casualty dressing wounds, the cord on Upton's pyjama bottoms fails so they keep dropping, as an criminal on the run (Dudley Sutton) and the Policeman pursuing him both arrive at the ward for treatment.

 Something that strikes me as much more amusing than these larks is the performance and realisation of the students' long-suffering teacher, Professor Loftus - a consistent virtue of this series. Graeme Garden likes to give Loftus the most medically precise dialogue, and the Professor is often the only character to get given actively funny, witty, things to say.

 Ernest Clark is very good at making a character who could appear overbearing always sympathetic to the viewer, helped by a particularly skill with dialogue speaking, combining impressive exactitude and projection with a sure sense of when to find moments that convey vulnerability within his speeches. (Ernest Clark must have been a busy man at this time, simultaneously serving as President of Equity from 1969-73 and fathering four children in his sixties!). Loftus' tirade in the first scene, tearing a strip off Waring when he finds him daydreaming during his lecture, is a model of scripting and performance for this character:

LOFTUS: It often seems to me that the present generation of medical students suffer from an occupational disease: premature degeneration of the nervous system. SOFTENING OF THE BRAIN, WARING! No doubt brought on by disuse and excessive alcoholic intake.

WARING: Yes, sir.

LOFTUS: (Exhausted) I don't sleep well, Waring.

WARING: No, sir?

LOFTUS: No. I lie awake dreaming of hundreds of Doctor Warings treating sprained ankles by amputation and trying to cure dysentery with senna pods!

 As the Professor turns his back on the student, the young man gives an unexpected (wry, fond) smile, showing both the shamed character of Waring and Robin Nedwell the performer being impressed and amused by what he's just seen.