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: Bless Me Father - A Mixed-Up Marriage (16 August 1981)

 Sitcom was an unusual form for these clerical stories to take. If you didn't know, and heard that a series of memoirs about the life of a novice Catholic curate in a suburban London parish 30 years ago were being adapted for television, you might assume that they would be a nostalgic family drama programme, perhaps along the lines of All Creatures Great & Small on Sunday evenings. But Peter de Rosa, the books' author, thought that his experiences would work well as a sitcom, and was trusted enough to be granted his wish. All 21 episodes are by De Rosa, who never wrote anything else for television, and the sense of an individual authorial voice speaking from experience was one of Bless Me Father's two great strengths (along with the casting, of course)
 

 This final episode certainly has enough material and conflict in it to sustain a 50 minute drama. It's the story of a mixed marriage between a Rabbi's son and a Catholic orphan girl, which both religions attempt to block (nice to see Cyril Shaps as the rabbi).
 

 The implications of the story are disheartening in places, with some unhappiness due for the couple whichever decision they make. Both the girl's parents were killed in the war we are told (in the kind of aside rarely heard in an LWT sitcom) and rejecting the chance of a loving marriage would break her heart again, but the couple face estrangement from both of their faiths if they do marry.
 

 Most viewers' sympathies would be towards the young couple marrying, and the script deftly plays with this, with the greatest laughs coming from the holy men's appalled reactions when the couple threaten to convert to Anglicanism. But it's to the script's credit that it doesn't skirt around the problems that the couple will face, and accomplishes a happy ending that's harmonious without being sentimental. And a marriage is a great way to end the series as a whole, too, part of a British literary and theatrical comic tradition that goes back centuries.

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: Don't Drink The Water - Home From Home (27 July 1974)

 The obvious emphasis in this first episode is on broad comedy that creates as many opportunities as possible for Stephen Lewis to pull faces. But there is something quite oppressive about the barrage of relentless discomfort and embarrassment that Blakey and his sister immediately face in their new Spanish flat.

 The porter and his wife are rowing in Spanish. The builders are still in the apartment when they move in. The taps fall off the wall. The water is brown. The sea view is of another block of flats. A lizard scuttles across the floor. Pat Coombs gets hysterical. A storm breaks a window. There's a power cut. The next-door neighbours are cackling vulgarians. It’s established that all of the money has gone into moving here and it's impossible to get back home. Whenever Blakey tells anyone that Pat Coombs is his sister they think that's a euphemism for his mistress, etc., etc.

 The studio audience responds ecstatically to this catalogue of misfortunes. But there isn't space for much empathy in the script, apart from perhaps the five years of affection automatically accrued for Blakey off the back of On The Buses. After about five minutes, I started to daydream about how well (with minimal adjustment) this would work as a horror story. It just needs something a bit more perverse or grotesque about the couple next door, or a mutilated cat on the doorstep to fit into place...

A Comedy On This Day: Thick As Thieves - Holy Deadlock (20 July 1974)

  The final episode particularly demonstrates why, despite its superb pedigree, this series is such a disappointment.

 It's never really sure what the joke is and where the emotional heart of the premise lies. How are we supposed to feel about George, Stan and Annie's unusual arrangement? It often doesn't seem to matter very much until someone remembers it. More to the point, how do three characters themselves feel about it? There's no strong bond of love-hate between the two friends, they just seem to sort of half-heartedly accept each other except for on odd occasions when the comedy requires one of them to be in a bad mood.

 Are they supposed to be inept criminals or unfortunate ones? Oughtn't the viewer to have the feeling that something is at stake if they try to go straight or return to crime? The more one thinks about it, the flimsier it seems - the exact opposite of the experience of watching Clement & La Frenais' other series.

 More thought has gone into the set design for the gangster's flat that George and Stan burgle in this episode, an elegant space filled with vulgar furnishings - leopard skin-styled sofa and zebra-patterned waterbed, shown via a surprising overhead shot that represents the experience of the friends looking at their reflections in the mirrored ceiling.

 The best thing about this series is it's opening credits, a tiny film in four shots, with each section full of little detail that rewards repeated viewing; the terraced street with the tower blocks looming behind; Annie, George and Stan walking through the market, each carrying a bag of shopping, George eating an apple, offering the fruit to Stan and then losing his balance when he has a second bite; a partially demolished house on a bed of rubble with a burning brazier, inside which we can see into the old, wallpapered rooms where two workmen are taking up the first floor floorboards; the tower block again, panning down its many floors to reveal the three leads sat on a wall in front of the building, their heads craned to look up at the top floor - they turn round to face forwards and George kisses Annie, who is then kissed by Stan while George turns away in a huff.

 All this is soundtracked by a Mike Hugg theme, of the same ilk as Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? and it's subsequent film theme. The arrangement and singing sounds very 1974 to my ears, like Hudson Ford, say:

Some of us are like most of us
We do the best we can
We make ends meet
and we live on the street
where they're pulling the houses down (down down)

But life's just making do, my love
We'll just have to see it through, my love
And if three have to live like two, my love
we'll do the best we can

 There's a neat use of a mandolin a la 'Maggie May' in this piece. You don't initially take much notice of the female voice that doesn't join in until the second line, but then you remember her when you hear the song performed again as a duet over the end credits.

 Would that so much craft and care had gone into the rest of the programme.

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: Hark At Barker - Rustless On Law (17 July 1970)

 Hark At Barker must be the least documented work that Alan Ayckbourn has ever written. I had a look at half a dozen Ayckbourn books on my shelf after watching this, and it barely gets a mention anywhere.

 One reason for this neglect is the pen name Peter Caulfield. It's understandable to assume that he wrote it under an assumed name because he was embarrassed by it, but the actual reason was because he was under contract for the BBC at the time. Once you know that its by him, you can then detect elements of Ayckbourn in the programme, especially in the way that the routines involve a lot of playing games and enacting out scenarios, but Ronnie Barker's star peronna is so dominant - and the material is so much like a lot of pieces that he went on to do in The Two Ronnies - that you tend not to register the actual writing so much.

 Ayckbourn and Barker went back to 1964, when Barker appeared in Ayckbourn's first West End play (if only for three weeks), Mr Whatnot. Barker played one of his trademark crusty aristocrats, Lord Slingsby-Craddock, and the show was a 'silent' comedy about a mute piano tuner employed by the Slingsby-Craddocks, with no dialogue but with a hugely elaborate sound plot of hundreds of sound cues instead. Barker continued with this type of comedy in Futtocks End, The Picnic and By The Sea, and it’s a slight shame that Ayckbourn and Barker's only TV collaboration wasn't also in this vein.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Sea - Murder! He Said (7 July 1974)

 You can see why this was the most expensive Doctor series, with the money spent on the on deck Canary Islands location filming being put upfront onscreen. These location bits always seem to be subsidiary to the farcical operation of the main plot, which again involves dashing about from set to set inside the ship. And very good sets they are, too - and more of them than found in most sitcoms!

 This week, Doctor Waring has been brawling and feuding with the ship's purser, exclaiming, "I'll murder you" in public earshot - words which then rebound on him when the purser goes missing. Something that strikes me is how, although you think of Robin Nedwell as being a gangling and amiable performer, he's surprisingly convincing at being tough and menacing.

 And then I remember something that I hadn't thought about for decades. Did I see him act onstage? Yes, he had a season at the RSC - 1996, so maybe even his last job before he died a couple of years later (of a heart attack in a doctors' surgery, ironically enough). The thing that sticks in the mind is a starry production of Ben Jonson's Jacobean city comedy The Devil Is An Ass. The two leads were John Nettles as Merecraft the confidence trickster and David Troughton as Fitzdottrel the foolish gentleman. Digs out old programme... but also Sheila Steafal as Lady Tailbush, a young Damian Lewis as the young gallant Wittipol and - Robin Nedwell as Gilthead the goldsmith!

 Read the script, and I can just see and hear him - "We live by finding fools out to be trusted" - a bit thicker and greyer and playing a father, but still using those same comic skills to good effect. That was one of those really good ensembles, when you can sense that the actors are happy to be there, sharing the process with the audience. Its a happy thought that his last performances were in the company of his peers, doing good work and being recognised for doing it.

A Comedy On This Day: Thick As Thieves - Three Into Two Won't Go (6 July 1974)

 A series about two old friends who aren't so young anymore, one of whom has just got out of prison, Thick As Thieves sometimes feels like the precise midway point between Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? and Going Straight. Only not nearly so good as either, and without the BBC's resources to make all aspects of the programme of noticeable quality...

 There's an odd sensation - even in occasional flashes of really good wring - that Clement and La Frenais are resting on their laurels. For example, Bob Hoskins' George gets a nostalgic speech about how he met his wife ten years ago in the Streatham Locarno and you think, 'That feels like a remix of something that you've already written'.

 This week, Annie and Stan have booked a holiday on the Costa Brava behind George's back. The studio audience respond best to the sight of John Thaw trying on a pair of too-tight trunks, but the more interesting part is a jealous George complaining to Annie's best friend in the backroom of the dry cleaners that she manages. It isn't particularly funny, but it is dramatically and emotionally engaging, pointing ahead to the time when Clement and La Frenais will start writing comedy-dramas outside of the sitcom format.

A Comedy On This Day: On The Buses - Bon Voyage (4 July 1969)

 On The Buses rarely seemed to have much interest in plotting or telling stories... The impression it gives is usually a succession of five-minute segments in which it is optimistically hoped that the regulars might do some of their funny stuff in, rather than properly connected scenes.

 For a programme that really isn't interested in exploring contemporary living, it’s instructive to note what modern aspects still leak through. The lone mention of anything present day and external is - when a passing tramp steals Stan's trousers - Blakey calling him "the Maharishi Butler".

 The idea of a package holiday is still a tremendous novelty - only Stan and Jack have been on one before. Aside from the expectation of greasy foreign food and opportunities for lechery, comedy is also derived from how the experience of flying and customs is still unfamiliar and a source of anxiety. One will-this-do? scene milks Stan's worries about limiting his baggage to under 33 lbs. as much as is possible, with him packing and repacking his case, and planning to wear all of his clothes on the plane to avoid excess charges. When Stan and Jack depart for the holiday at the end of the episode all the comic emphasis is on Stan wearing multiple coats and jumpers, but the really strange costume is the unsettling sight of Jack wearing a cravat...

 Another scene has Jack showing off his new-fangled gadget of an Instamatic camera. A dolly bird clippie passes by, and he offers to take her picture. Very conveniently, she then immediately gets called away after the shot is taken, and says that she'll come back to see how its turned out. When the picture comes out, it transpires that - what a card! - Jack has just taken a close-up of her tits... This is perhaps the single most irritating incident of the episode, not so much for the egregious sexism but more for how it then goes on to flunk what would be a rare moment of dramatic interest, by not having the young woman return asking to see her picture.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Sea - Wolf In Ship's Clothing (30 June 1974)

 Moving Doctors Waring and Stuart-Clark's capers on-board was a counterproductive move, preventing them from moving out and about and interacting with the usual range of patients and colleagues. And how convenient that Professor Lomas' identical brother should turn out to be the Captain! It is fun to hear a 'Sailor's Hornpipe' arrangement of the Doctor theme, though, and the men look smart in their white uniforms.

 This week, Dr Waring ends up seeing three women simultaneously over one night - his jealous nurse girlfriend (Elizabeth Counsell), a rich young American passenger (Sandra Dickinson) and her blowsy mother (Patricia Hamilton). Nothing is especially funny, but it is fast-moving and skillfully performed and orchestrated, Robin Nedwell continually zipping between two bars, the mother's cabin, a discotheque and the bridge. The ship's disco is the most intriguing of these locations, with the dance floor behind bars and a clientele of unengaged non-speaking extras dancing to 'Mama Weer All Crazee Now' and 'Roll Away The Stone'.

A Comedy On This Day: Thick As Thieves - The Trouble With Tommy (29 June 1974)

 I've tried to watch this series more than once and have never got beyond three episodes... Seeing an episode 'blind' turns out to be a better way to experience the programme, as all of the alienating things about it (the unsatisfactory scenario, poorly-realised characterization, etc) don't seem to matter so much when you haven't got a whole series of the thing to get through. It’s closer to how the 1974 viewer would have experienced the programme, as a fleeting moment in the flow of a Saturday evening's viewing.

 The story is that familiar comedy staple, the regulars harbouring an escaped criminal. But the way that it's realised makes it look like (and also, to some extent, is performed like) a contemporaneous episode of New Scotland Yard, with a few neat directorial touches. We have to wait five minutes until we get a big close-up, at the dramatic moment when Bob Hoskins and John Thaw suggest that, "we could do another job". There's also an unsitcommy overhead show from the top of the staircase, looking down at Thaw and Pat Ashton, adding some tension when their house is raided as they harbour an escaped convict upstairs.

 Although it’s got a Mike Hugg theme tune and a shot of a derelict building in the credits, there aren't so many signifiers that you're watching a Clement and La Frenais script. But odd flashes of quality writing do flare up occasionally, especially in the descriptions of off-screen characters and events, and the evocation of the wider world it's set in. Such as Stan's explanation to George of how the area has changed since he's been away:

 Since you've been inside, there's been a social transformation in Fulham. Yeah, your essential working class cottages is fetching thirty thousand now. The yellow door brigade's moved in - ad men and newscasters with trendy wives and kids with names like Emma and Simon.

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 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 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 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 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 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.