A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Large - Mother & Father Doing Well (18 July 1971)

PROFESSOR LOFTUS: Clark, if I wanted someone to make inane comments during my operations I should hire Kenneth Wolsteholme.

 It may be that Fawlty Towers has primed me to expect greater things from his scripts, but I do find John Cleese's Doctor episodes to generally be the most interesting ones. The subtle notes of cruelty and violence work particularly well in a medical setting, a place where injury and pain are always a possibility.

 This week's guest star is Martin Shaw, returning from Doctor In The House as combustible Welshman Dr Evans. He now has a heavily pregnant wife in tow, and Cleese manages to mine more than one strand of inspired comedy from her condition. For Richard O'Sullivan's unpopular Dr Bingham she becomes the source of inappropriately phrased enthusiasm - "I mean, after all she is due to pup this evening, isn't she? I hope she won't be too long - I can't wait to get at her!"

 Her condition also inspires a particularly well-realised and original farcical sequence, when she masquerades as a nurse during an operation on her husband conducted by Professor Loftus, with the doctors having to show her what to do via mime behind the surgeon's back. Another layer of complication is then added to this scene once the contractions start....

 Another Cleese trait is managing to pack more absurdity and flights of crazy fantasy into a sitcom than you might think possible, seen this week in a subplot about Dr Upton treating patients who turn out to be mad. Professor Loftus is much better at dealing with them than the callow Upton, knowing that quite the best way to deal with a man who thinks that there's a faulty light bulb in his head is to mime changing the bulb, quickly sending the satisfied patient on his way.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Large - With A Little Help From My Friends (27 June 1971)

 Dr Upton is temporarily put in charge of a surgery, and Dr Collier and Dr Stuart-Clark spoil things for him. Not every Doctor episode was written by a comedy luminary of their generation, and this one is by the uncelebrated Geoff Rowley & Andy Baker. Its a bit messy, with sources of intended comedy coming from several directions; a nosey cockney charlady, a bevy of teenage ravers (led by Shirley Cheriton); a pair of homosexuals in a pub responding with interest when the Doctors raise their voices; and a bewildering filmed insert with Christopher Timothy as a car salesman in a false moustache. Nothing really sticks, and it’s often annoying.

 Something more interesting happens in the second half when Upton sacks his two friends and appoints a new doctor by letter. And - guess what? Doctor Berrington turns out to be a woman! A young woman played by Tessa Wyatt. The permutations of this situation have a bit more potential that what went before, and its a shame that they don't get enough time to develop beyond Dr Upton getting flustered when he talks to her, mansplaining what the job entails, and complaining to his friends in the pub that she's too competent and trying to take over. It ends with a hint of romantic hopes expressed by Dr Upton. The best bit - because it doesn't have to try to be funny - happens under the credits, with the new Doctor tidying her surgery at the end of the working day and shutting the door. I'm pleased to see that Dr Berrington appears in a couple more episodes, so maybe her character will develop.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Large - It's All In The Mind (13 June 1971)

 A quaint script from John Cleese this week, that deals with occult matters when the Doctors' practice is challenged by a rival local surgery, run by a white witch. Two star comedy leads of the future appear, with Patricia Routledge as Ms Watt the witch and Mollie Sugden as a patient.

 These two guest stars both play archetypal Cleese character types; the monomaniac who speaks at a tangent to what the conversation ought to be, in exacting detail (Sugden), and the zealous speaker who turns out to be mad, trapping the reasonable interlocutor in an increasingly uncomfortable situation. Patricia Routledge is really good in this part, with a forceful trilling laugh that discomposes anyone else around, and a crazed jerking movement when casting spells that still manages to maintain a refined deportment.

 We also get a lot of "Who's on first?"-style confusion out of Dr Upton knowing that Mrs Watt is a witch, and not wanting to mention it... Which? No, I mean what! Yes? No! etc. The details of the supernatural remedies manage to sound both memorably absurd and plausible. For example, a wart is cured by rubbing a snail on it, then putting the snail on a thistle - when the snail dies, the wart disappears.

Once again we get a the surprising use of a handheld camera in the location film insert, making the Doctors hiding in Mrs Watt's garden feel much more dramatic and dangerous than you'd expect in a sitcom. And Mrs Watt's surgery, filled with occult bric-a-brac, is another commission that gives LWT's inventive set designers something to really get their teeth into.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Large - Let's Start At The Beginning (6 June 1971)

 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. 

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Large - No Ill Feeling! (30 May 1971)

 The most historically significant episode of the Doctor series, in which Dr. Upton stays at a hotel and John Cleese's script tries out a few ideas that will get further developed in Fawlty Towers. Timothy Bateson's hotel manager shares some traits with Basil Fawlty - he's henpecked and exasperated with guests whenever they remotely put him out in any way - but he's an altogether more morose sort of character.

 He's actually second fiddle to guest star Roy Kinnear, who plays a self-styled funny man, Mr Davidson. With his jests and quips and insistence that everyone joins in, Davidson is a memorably awful personality. If this was an episode of Monty Python, he'd be played by Eric Idle in "Wink, wink, nudge, nudge" mode, and the importance that he places on being perceived as funny make him a kind of uncle to David Brent. The story shares features with a lot of Monty Python sketches, in particular the nightmare situation of being buttonholed by a monomaniac making presumptions about you ("No ill feeling! Eh, Doc?") and a collective taking up a group insanity - the episode makes very good choric use of the other guests in the dining room, all laughing uproariously when Mr Davidson makes fun of Dr. Upton and then responding in appalled silence when Upson is compelled to tell a joke.

 There's a surprising use of a handheld camera in the two filmed inserts in this episode, giving exterior scenes a strange verite-type feel. This works especially well when Dr Upton gets startled in the street by Mr Davidson calling out to him from an office window and causing Upton to walk into a lamppost. The shaky style gives the stressful scene a sense of real-life disorientation, rather than artificial comedy choreography.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Large - Upton Sells Out? (2 May 1971)

 There's an interesting overlaying of two comedic forms in this Garden & Oddie script, both of which stem from the same initial catalysing situation of Upton having to be at an interview for a well-paid Harley Street job at very short notice.

 One strand is classic farce, where humiliating circumstances take characters out of their control, eventually reducing them to a helpless state. Having three doctors needing to share two suits between them (Collier borrows Upton's for a date an an exclusive restaurant, Upton borrows Stuart Clarke's for the Harley Street interview) works well as a funny mechanism, because as long as it goes on it means that one of them will always going to have to be at a disadvantage, while another will be in ill-fitting clothes.

 There's also an interesting dialectical strain not always apparent in these shows, with the Harley Street work (which pays £60 a week) leading characters to ask questions about the meaning and value of work as a doctor. The expensive practice is shown to be something of a sham, a place where rich hypochondriacs go to be indulged, experience butler service and pay a fortune for the experience.

 Dr Whiteland (the head of this practice) is set up as a haughty battle-axe, but something isn't quite right about the way that she's played for that. Initially I thought that it was because the role had been rather ambitiously over-cast (played by Fabia Drake, b. 1904, and who had certainly enjoyed a remarkable career). But eventually it becomes clear in the final scene that Fabia Drake's considerable charm and dignity is deliberate, as Dr Whiteland takes the jejune Upton to her office and gently explains how she uses the private practice to fund her NHS work with the genuinely needy. Its a relatively long and articulate speech for such a programme, and when combined with the circumstances that have brought her to explain herself (Collier gate-crashing the practice by disguising himself as a tramp and bringing along a scrofulous family in need of consultation with him) it shows how prevalent the influence of George Bernard Shaw remained for generations of writers - even on production-line ITV sitcoms - providing a workable template for how to investigate power in dramatic form.