A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In The House - Doctor On The Box (26 June 1970)

 Another Garden and Oddie script, Garden even briefly appearing this week in a cameo as a television presenter. This week, the cameras of 'London Television' are filming a report about student life at St Swithins'. In the words of Professor Loftus: "Television, Upton - the cause of so many cases of myopia, bad posture, stagnation of the blood and premature senility!"

 This is an episode in which the set-up is slightly laborious - a succession of scenes of the students either behaving in a stilted manner as soon as the cameras start rolling, or being filmed behaving rowdily - but the pay-off (of the students watching themselves on the eventual televised report) is worth waiting for, rewarding the viewer with the novel experience of seeing what has already happened from a new perspective. Within the context of a Doctor sitcom, the report itself works in a different comic register, which requires a level of quick-witted televisual literacy on the part of the viewer to work out what's wrong about the sequencing and editing of how its been put together. Also relatively tricky to put together in the studio, I would have thought. Might this final scene, which requires an edited version of scenes from the recording to be assembled and fed through a monitor on the set, have been recorded at a later date?

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.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In The House - Hot Off The Presses (5 June 1970)

 This Garden & Oddie episode has particularly close affinities to The Goodies; the Doctors taking on a job assigned to them (revitalising the hospital magazine); a lot of choric reactions from the other Doctors to the one speaking; a filmed sequence of sight gags (the Doctors distributing their magazine on the streets); one character's changed circumstances immediately indicated by them returning to headquarters in a striking brand new costume.

 The depiction of female characters is particularly regrettable this week with only two women in the story - the one a dolly bird model for the Doctors to pursue and the other a plain spinster for them to avoid. Oddly, the spinster character, her status denoted by her short hair and ordinary clothes, now looks just like an ordinary woman to contemporary viewers.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In The House - If You Can Help Somebody... Don't! (29 May 1970)

 This episode must be about as downbeat as a Doctor episode could get. It has the sort of storyline about the limits of empathy more often seen in the early series of Angels. A malingering old woman in hospital doesn't want to be discharged. She persuades the naive young doctor to visit her at home. When he does visit, despite being fully fit she uses the doctor to do her housework and buy and pay for her shopping. The doctor is then surprised to discover that the old woman doesn't live on her own, but has her daughter with her, a spinster in her thirties trapped into doing her mother's bidding. Against his better judgement the doctor asks her out. When the daughter arrives at the medical student household, she's brought her cases and has left home for good...

 This episode doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions. It sets up a dramatic situation that shows the potential for a greater range of stories and approaches within this series, but is too rushed and cheerful to really explore the situation. Garden & Oddie are writers of great comic ability, but one thing that they really weren't was Galton & Simpson. Pathos wasn't ever their hallmark, so that when the episode ends with a Steptoe-type situation of the daughter returning back home it doesn't leave much emotional impression - which it really ought to do to fully work as a story - and certainly no more than the final shot of the young doctors larking about as per usual. The best comic moments are found in the set-up, showing the ruses that the old lady uses to get others to do her bidding, and reversing conventional expectations of powerlessness.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In The House - Nice Bodywork, Lovely Finish (1 May 1970)

 A quaint episode this week in which Garden and Oddie experiment with seeing how far they can pull Doctor In The House in the direction of black comedy.

 Even by thrown-together seventies ITV sitcom standards, the mechanisms by which this episode sets things up are irritatingly implausible. Collier is still prepared to buy an old banger that he was told about from a man in a pub for £30 once he discovers that its a hearse, which he then just happens to absent-mindedly park outside the hospital mortuary. He then picks up his friends at the hospital to drive to a rugby match in Cambridge. Its easy enough to accept that a corpse would then get mistakenly loaded onto the hearse, but bewildering that when Upton and Waring notice that there's a coffin on board they deliberately decide not to tell Collier.

 Once the students get on the road things perk up considerably over a long stretch of 16mm location filming of country b roads and deserted woodlands. Once he realises there's a corpse on board, Collier starts speeding back to the mortuary. The police give chase and Upton and Wearing take the coffin away and hide in the woods.

 Being stranded in the middle of nowhere with a dead body is a scenario of doubtful comic potential, but considerable dramatically interest. The filmed environment lives up to the strangeness of the situation. Serendipitously, there's still winter snow on the ground and there's the most unsitcommy overhead shot of the two young men carrying the coffin, filmed through the gap at the top of an iron church gate. If you started the episode a third of the way in and got rid of the laugh track, for a few minutes it could be a The Frighteners story.