A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In Charge - The Taming Of The Wolf (August 27 1972)

 This episode is almost precisely the sort of thing that first comes to mind when you think of the Doctor series - young doctors chasing younger nurses. Or in this case, a new intake of young phsyiotherapists...

 Chief among whom (indeed the only one with any lines) is Deborah Watling as Emma Livingstone, a doe-eyed ingenue. Watching her in action here gives you a good idea of what she must have been like in all of those touring farces. She's given very little to work with in Garden & Oddie's script, being more of a figure for Robin Nedwell to react to than much of a distinct character in her own right. Despite Professor Lomas' description of Dr Waring as "in training for a future as a dirty old man", Emma brings out Waring's previously unseen gallant and chaste side, rhapsodising about holding her hand and taking her to a Cliff Richard concert. Which doesn't go down well with anyone.

 All of the best things in this episode are physical, rather than verbal. First Emma giving Dr Waring a massage, out of which which Robin Nedwell gets laughs from the anticipated sensual experience turning out to be a source of acute physical pain. Then there's a doctor's ball with two dance routines. Against his will, Dr Waring is forced into dancing a jive routine with Helen Fraser's Dr Bingham - something that's particularly interesting to watch as Nedwell has to convey reluctance while simultaneously dancing very well, performing elaborate lifts and spins on Fraser. And then - from out of nowhere, really - Deborah Watling dances the Charleston, really well, with Richard O'Sullivan. It seems implausible that this would ever happen at a 1972 medical students' ball, but it is fun to see two very familiar performers enjoying themselves and showing off their agility in this famously silly dance.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In Charge - Yellow Fever (20 August 1972)

I have a feeling Professor Loftus wants to speak to me about that patient sitting up in the middle of his operation.

What happened?

He took one look at his intestines and fainted.

 Another Graham Chapman script (with Bernard McKenna) and about as absurd as the Doctor comedies got, with a delegation of 28 representatives from the People's Republic of China visiting St Swithin's. A busy episode that packs an awful lot of gags into 25 minutes, largely visual jokes about herding multiple Mao-suited figures who go to places where they shouldn't, hide behind doors, etc. At one point the script even requires the Chinese to stand in line and fall like dominoes.
 

 Two modes of comedy intertwine - the absurd (culturally specific details of trying to integrate with Chinese customs) and the farcical (moving the delegates about). The two styles reach their best moment of synthesis in a scene when the delegates, in surgical masks and swabs, attend an operation. Dr Waring prepares for the surgery by reciting from the Little Red Book, before Dr Bingham enters with a Policeman - "Arrest these Chinamen!"

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In Charge - Shut Up & Eat What You're Given (13 August 1972)

 There is no scene in any drama set at a mealtime that cannot be improved by making some reference to what the characters are eating. It's almost the only activity that can be shown on screen that everybody watching has an active interest in, and imagining the taste and texture of the food consumed encourages an easy empathetic understanding of something of what the characters are feeling at the moment.
 

 So an episode about hospital food was always going to be onto something of a winner, and this one does what you'd hope of it, with charred sausages flying off plates, etc. The doctors' canteen is a worryingly insanitary place, where dinner ladies cough all over the food and cooks reheat what gets left over in perpetuity. The only thing that it has going for it is that a three course meal costs 12 1/2p there, £1.69 in today's money.
 

 Two other sorts of food offset the unappetising canteen stodge. There is delicious food, such as the joint of beef and roast potatoes which Professor Loftus temps the dieting doctors with, and a fascinating replacement menu when the canteen offers alternative fare - asparagus soup, prawn cocktails, steaks and creme caramel. A three course meal of this calibre costs Doctor Waring £1.25 (£16.20 today).
 

 Some research has gone into the third cuisine, with Waring evangelising about trendy macrobiotics, and recruiting Collier into sharing his new diet with him. The food that they eat (millet spaghetti and seaweed) is harder to imagine the taste of. You get the feeling that Jonathan Lynn is presenting his research findings to the viewer here in a way that pre-empts his Yes Minister work, especially when Waring and Collier contract scurvy through Vitamin C deficiency, not an immediately obvious comedy consequence.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In Charge - The Fox (18 June 1972)

 This Graham Chapman and Bernard McKenna episode mostly consists of the kind of hi-jinks that you expect to find in a routine Doctor episode - Doctors chasing nurses, fearsome matrons, practical jokes and the like. Searching for trace elements of Chapman preoccupations, there's a particularly absurd rustic patient who takes carrots and potatoes to bed and a rather sharply drawn retirement party for the drunken retiring matron.

 There's also lots of conflict. You don't generally see the students disliking each other in these series, but Richard O'Sullivan's priggish Bingham is shown to be actively unpopular with his peers - the one large close-up that we get is of him and another doctor squaring up to each other, eyeball-to-eyeball. Its one of a handful of thoughtfully-directed visual moments, along with an unexpected overhead shot of Dr Waring grappling with a nurse on a couch, and an understated close-up insight into Bingham - who has just closed a door on his fellows after an argument about his lack of interest in pursuing women - the camera lingering on his pensive face.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In Charge - Which Doctor? (21 May 1972)

 I can remember watching a Galton and Simpson interview decades ago in which they explained why they preferred writing sitcoms for the BBC than ITV. You've got that extra five minutes on the BBC that ITV have to fill with commercials, they said - you can use that time to not go for the laughs.

 This episode - a breakneck farcical caper of borrowed cars reported stolen and assumed identities, which ends with all three Doctors in the cells claiming to be each other - is a good example of a story that could do with those extra five minutes. The viewer has to take quite a lot on trust, especially the one-off characters of the policemen and the dolly bird whom Doctor Collier is trying to impress. The Police Sergeant appears in increased states of strain and exasperation in every scene, ending up with his hair on end. Bob Todd is skilled at conveying this state, but we never really get to actually see what drives him to it. Similarly, Collier's date is only drawn in the broadest of strokes - we're shown her cleavage before her face! - and really deserves just an initial minute more of character comedy for us to get a sense of who she is, to understand what's at stake for her in the action.

 The Doctor series were famously a seedbed for writers of more celebrated comedies of their day (Monty Python and The Goodies). Today's script is co-written by Jonathan Lynn, and the initial scenes of Professor Loftus showing a distinguished consultant around and angling to receive an honour are very Yes, Minister.

 A couple of very nice visual moments along the way. To make up for her sketchy character, Linda Cunningham's character does at least get one (closer than anyone else) close-up, seductively holding a wine glass that's larger than you'd expect for this period. And the closing (filmed) shot of the first half - a receding George Layton desperately running after the 'stolen' car in the road, shot from the car - is an unexpected moment of quality.