A Very Peculiar Practice
TV series, 1986 (Series 1) 1988 (Series 2)
Written by Andrew Davies
Directed by David Tucker
Produced by Ken Riddington
Theme Music: Dave Greenslade, sung by Elkie Brooks
SEE ALSO ‘A VERY POLISH PRACTICE’ (1992)
This got voted ‘ Fifth Best TV Comedy’ in a Guardian poll in 2010. That’s about right, but perfect comedy length is 25-30 minutes, and this is 55 minutes. I’d place it first in ‘TV Comedy series at about an hour.’
It did the Fawlty Towers thing … just two series of seven episodes each, and stop. Though it did return for a one-off 90 minute sequel A Very Polish Practice.
The setting is the Medical Centre at Lowlands University. Andrew Davies wrote it while lecturing at Warwick University, but the series was filmed at Leicester University, I thought. Wikipedia says it was Birmingham and Keele, but that Davies had UEA in Norwich in mind with its brutalist architecture. UEA declined after Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man. They were sensitive about it … so am I. There are a couple of remarks about postgrad students in the text which I took personally as one of Malcolm Bradbury’s postgrad students!
It looks like any concrete and glass 60s built campus. Andrew Davies must be Britain’s most successful screenwriter. Apart from A Very Peculiar Practice he has specialized in literary adaptations … Pride & Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Wives and Daughters, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Bleak House, LittleDorrit, Mr Selfridge, War & Peace, Les Miserables, Sanditon to A Suitable Boy. I just wish he had written more originals. It’s pitch perfect. There is never a point where dialogue jarred, and that’s very very rare for me.
Peter Davison: Although I love both series, the second was my favourite. It was a really good satire on Thatcher’s Britain, and this view of education being run by big business. It was the kind of series where you didn’t want to change any of the lines. Very often you get scripts where you say to the director, “Do you mind if I change this to this,” but I don’t remember a single instance where anybody wanted to change a single line in it, even down to the last full stop and comma.
We watched it on broadcast 1986 and 1988. We taped it on VHS and re-watched it. We bought Series One on DVD and watched it. Now we’re watching the complete set … Series one and two, plus A Very Polish Practice.
There’s the basic cast of four doctors, a nurse and a receptionist.
The characters
Dr Stephen Dakar (Peter Davison)
Stephen is our hero, the new doctor, sincere, fresh from a nasty divorce. Peter Davison has the earnest face of a lost puppy. Honest, caring, he’s out of place. He was already halfway though his lead role in All Creatures Great & Small (65 episodes, 1978-1990) so we were pre-disposed to find him cuddly. He had also just been the “Fifth doctor” in Doctor Who so was a major catch for the series.
Dr Jock McCannon (Graham Crowden) the alcoholic head of the centre. A fan of R.D. Laing and the author of Sexual Anxiety and The Common Cold. He believes illness is all in the mind. He is working on his next book, a mere fifteen years on, The Sick University.
Dr Rose Marie (Barbara Flynn).
She has no surname, not believing in sirs or sires. She believes all illness stems from a phallocentric world and men are the root cause of all female illness. She is bisexual, yet exudes sexuality from every pore, not helped by her insistence on wearing a white overall. It buttons up the front but there are no buttons below the thighs. The suspicion is that she wears a medical overall so she can get angry when mistaken for a nurse. She’s ahead of her time again … research showed that doctors’ suits and ties were a source of infection and they’d be better wearing scrubs. When we rewatched Family At War we were puzzled over why Barbara Flynn had this aura of sexuality in a wildly different role, then we realized we were taking back her characterization from A Very Peculiar Practice.
Dr Bob Buzzard (David Troughton).
Dr Bob (Please, please call me Robert …) is ex-public school, pin-striped suited. The GP as businessman.
Mark Fisher: Buzzard is the very epitome of the Thatcherite man, impatient with any concept of public service, hungry to transform the practice into private consultancy, and absolutely untroubled by any concerns about corporate influence.
Film Quarterly, 1 December 2011
How prescient Andrew Davies was. Thirty-four years on that’s exactly what our local GP practices are like. They even put “Ltd” after their name. I’m going to use this review to discuss medical practices a lot. I’ve had great GPs in the past. Dr Tadros, who delivered me, was my GP till I was 19. Once I was 16, he offered me a cigarette when he saw me. He was Egyptian, and like a kindly uncle in my teenage. The medical centre at Hull University was much more Peter Davison than any of the others. The chief GP was a drama fan and I often had friendly social conversations at productions. Then when the kids were small, our GP would turn up personally at any time of day or night. We became friends and went to his house for dinner. These were different times. A GP was a highly respected member of the community … they drove Rovers, then later SAABs or Volvos. Tony Blair removed the vocation from the job. They were no longer expected to take responsibility 24/7. Blair did for General Practice what Thatcher did to mines. Isn’t it interesting? Those prime ministers who sweep to power with the largest majorities, end up being reviled. Thatcher … Blair … and Boris Johnson will join them.
So back to Lowlands Medical Centre …
Bob Buzzard hates seeing patients. He wants to do it all on (primitive) computers. Our GPs started a triage system years ago. You phone and describe your symptoms to an unqualified and snappy receptionist, who will then decide whether the mighty doctor will decide to see you, leave a prescription or speak to you on the phone sometime of their choice in the next six hours … so do stay by the phone. They LOVE Covid-19. Now they don’t see anyone at all and keep the outer door locked. All the local practices have combined in one conglomerate so that you can’t switch either. It’s Bob Buzzard’s dream world. See The Daily Telegraph front page (from the BBC News site):
Then we add:
Maureen Garaghan (Lindy Whitford)
The Practice Nurse, who knows more than her bosses and regards them with contempt. I love her. It was just such a nurse who saved my younger son’s life when he was eighteen months old back in 1983. He had a temperature of 104, and a purple swollen arm. The locum (our much loved GP was on holiday) at our GP surgery prescribed Calpol. The practice nurse shook her head, dialled Casualty, handed the phone to him and said, ‘This child clearly has septicemia. Tell Casualty his parents are driving him there NOW!’
‘You can’t tell me what to do … I’m a doctor,’ he stuttered.
‘Do it NOW!’ she told him. He did. She was right. He was in hospital for over a month. When I thanked her on a later visit she whispered, ‘He’s a moron. He should be struck off!’
Mrs Kramer (Gillian Raine) is the stern strict discipline reception manager. Her job is to control access to the doctors.
They meet …
Lyn Turtle (Amanda Hillwood).
Policewoman doing a research degree on Body Language. An athlete and swimmer. Totally confident. The love interest in series one.
Takashi Kawahara. Mathematician who shares the staff flat with Dr Dakar. Burmese. A bit of a guru and advisor.
Ernest Hemmingway (John Bird) is the Vice-Chancellor as businessman and bully. He reminded me so much of more than one Managing Director in Publishing.
Then there are the two nuns who are a running emblem in every episode, usually observed raiding the rubbish skips for items like bicycle wheels and spreading litter across the lawns. The skip truck also starts every episode.
Then each episode has at least one major guest actor. I’m going to avoid plot spoilers, but focus rather on personal reactions and the prescience in the scripts!
Series One
A Very Long Way From Anywhere
The origin issue. Stephen has taken the job after a painful divorce. The receptionist mistakes him for a patient. We totally ignore an Afro-Caribbean man weeping in the waiting room. We’re meeting the characters.
Jock McCannon’s theme is “listening to the patient” yet after Stephen declines a morning shot of Scotch, he fails to pick up that Stephen is NOT a total abstainer, though he’s told so in every episode. He dismisses a Chinese girl’s acute appendicitis as nervous anxiety born from homesickness.
Bob Buzzard has his say about the university:
Bob Buzzard: I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like a very, very inefficient sector of British industry. Top management are totally corrupt and idle, middle management are incompetent and idle, and the workforce are bolshy. And idle. And of course, there’s no bloody product!”
Bob cites his qualificatuons:
Bob: Classical tale of a promising career gone sour. Shrewsbury. Trinity. Guy’s. Royal Durham, ICI, Princeton. Spell in Saudi. Then, fatal mistake: Came here. What about you?
Stephen: Birmingham… Birmingham… Birmingham… Walsall.
Stephen goes swimming with the ultra-competitive Bob who finishes and tells Stephen to do another six lengths. He starts to drown and is rescued by Lyn, who he takes to be a swimming instructor. In fact she’s a Ph. D student. This is the start of their friendship. She discovers he has a touch phobia.
We Love You, That’s Why We’re Here
with:
Peter Blake- Carl Pierce, drama lecturer
Francesca Brill – Angie Fry, drama student
Kate Eaton – Megan Phillips, Religious Education student
Hugh Grant – Colin, Scottish preacher
This is the episode I remember best, and my all-time favourite. Stephen is selected to give the opening address to new students. Bob gives him a couple of ‘confidence pills’ which are alcohol contra-indicated, then Chen wakes him up with morning coffee with a shot of brandy. The speech appears disastrous, but the students love him. ‘Come and see us even when you’re not ill,’ he exclaims.
This one is based around two students, Angie and Megan, who have to share a room. Angie adores her father. She is a drama student and a fantasist, and can’t wait to lose her virginity. She gets the pill prescribed from Stephen, telling him she was on it before. Megan is an uptight Welsh fundamentalist (with my Welsh grandmother’s maiden surname, I noted!) She thinks Lowlands is a den of iniquity and is prudish. Angie falls for her charismatic drama lecturer, Carl (Peter Blake). I was doing drama twenty years earlier. Yes, I did those same trust exercises too. He is perfect. I knew these people, all of them. I knew the religious studies teacher trying to get students to think outside their boxes.
The double room rang bells. The Lawns residential campus at Hull was designed with floors … five singles, two doubles on each floor, surrounding a communal living area. When I was in Hull a couple of years ago, I went to look … long converted to all singles. Modern students won’t put up with doubles. It was clear that all Catholic students were assigned doubles to keep them out of mischief too. I had a single. My friend Mick had a double with a student who knelt and prayed every night. Mich researched the Catholic connection! (Remember there are always nuns in sight at Lowlands). When my son was at an American university people actually wanted double rooms and quadruple rooms. Your room mates are your friends for life. Not for the British.
The freshers story was perfect. The twist is brilliant. Hugh Grant plays the fundamentalist Scots preacher in a gospel hall. Lyn has pulled Stephen along to the service to watch the body language. Megan goes up to stand with the preacher.
Hugh Grant, with Megan, in Stephen’s office is just about the funniest six second simpering silent performance I have ever seen. I expect I said at the time, ‘He’ll go far.” He did.
Lyn has also discovered that Stephen has an aversion to being touched and sets him on her touch therapy course.
Wives of Great Men
Timothy West – Professor Furie
Phillipa Urq – Helen Furie
The theme is that wives of great men suffer. As do the wives of those who think themselves great men. Timothy West is Professor Furie, manic-depressive and paranoid head of Biochemistry. He is convinced his wife is having an affair and has no idea that spilling joke remarks about gang bangs to all and sundry is offensive. A thoroughly nasty man. He is incredibly aggressive on first meeting Stephen to demand dexedrine to stay awake. As Bob explains, Furie is a qualified physician as well as a biochemist of world renown.
Somewhere in there I felt a certain empathy with him. He expects a medical doctor to patronize him so goes in all guns blazing. Stephen is the very last person in the world to patronize anyone. It set me thinking. Consultants and surgeons I’ve spoken to over five decades have always been friendly, informative and treat you as an equal intellect. General Practioners (GPs) on the other hand can indeed be patronizing and superior. People who were in the military agreed. ‘Officers speak to you nicely. NCOs don’t.’
Having written a book on Communication Skills, I had to stop and explain this to a GP. She was about thirty. I was sixty at the time. She said, ‘Come in, dear. Take a seat, dear. What’s troubling you, dear?’ I pointed out that she could call me Peter, or Mr Viney, or indeed ‘sir,’ but that ‘dear’ to a man of sixty was patronizing to the point of rudeness. It made me feel geriatric. She was totally perplexed. I think GPs should study communication skills, and also Lyn’s special subject … body language.
Furie takes a liking to Stephen and insists that he becomes his drinking buddy. Stephen can’t refuse – Furie is pro-Vice Chancellor. The wives aspect brings in GPs too. They are becoming the villains of this piece. One told me I should buy a bike and go to the gym. ‘I do a thirty minute ride, then an hour in the gym every morning before surgery,’ he said blithely. I looked at the picture of three kids which GPs keep on their desks (Bob Buzzard has one). ‘Who gets the kids up, gives them breakfact and takes them to school?’ I asked.
‘Oh, my wife takes care of all that domestic side of life,’ he said, ‘I’m far too busy.’
The wives of great men, indeed. Busy? Not working. The bastard was 30 minutes late coming in while we sat and waited. Busy enjoying exercise on your own. That isn’t busy. That’s recreation. Try getting kids breakfasted, uniformed and transported to school one day.
Black Bob’s Hamburger Suit
Kay Stoneham – Daphne Buzzard
David Gwillim – Jimmy Partington, of Hamburger Pharmaceuticals
Jonathan Haley & Nicholas Haley – Bob and Daphne’s sons
Bob has a smart new suit. It is a gift from Hamburger, a pharmaceutical company. He already has a nice leather briefcase from them. Their representative is Jimmy, an old school chum who boasts of his wealth to Bob, and dangles the prospect of trips to exotic places for conferences. He wants Bob to test a new drug, Confidan, that removes anxiety and treats an array of ailments. Rose Marie declines to participate, and so poor Stephen is enlisted to help.
Stephen and Lyn are invited to Sunday lunch with Jimmy at Bob’s house. The conversation as Daphne prepares the nouvelle cuisine starter (adorned with kiwi fruit) is precious stuff. Wonderfully snobby. Meanwhile the boys are telling Stephen what daddy thinks of his partners at the practice. The kids are great.
Jimmy, a total sleaze, admits that he tried to hit on Lyn on the landing but she declined his advances so she must be fond of Stephen.
The drug turns out to have an alarming side effect. They knew this from trials in the USA, which the ever-plotting Rose Marie has discovered in a series of phone calls. We are increasingly aware that Dr Rose Marie is manipulating everyone and lying to the other doctors. She is an immensely powerful presence, sending Stephen into nervous stuttering every time.
Pharmaceutical companies do shower doctors with freebies. Our GP practice has a height and weight machine with pulse check in the lobby. Then you take the results up to the GP. It has a drug company name on it. It measures my height at 5 ft 11 inches. I have had two knee operations this year and have had my height measured in hospital half a dozen times. Just under 6 foot 1 inches. We all lose height with age. At 21, I was 6 foot 3 inches. My sons also found they’re over an inch shorter on the machine. Of course, being an inch shorter increases your body mass index. Then you get prescribed drugs.
Contact Tracer
My example was apposite, for there is an outbreak of NSU in the university (non-specific urethritis, as immortalised in the track by Cream). Bob Buzzard comes up with contact tracing using his trusty computer (is it a BBC-B?). Thirty-four years later in the Covid pandemic he would be acclaimed. All four doctors participate and there’s a fascinating conclusion … an asymptomatic source. It will be an interesting one, and Stephen has to inform the person. Not a nice job in the circumstances.
Dealing with it daily does nothing for Stephen’s relationship with Lynn … he’s afraid of sex again.
Bob Buzzard is again well ahead of the curve. We have a copy of the BMA Family Medical Advisor a comprehensive guide to symptoms with flow charts (back to problems with urination). So it will say ‘Does it hurt when you pee?’ then there are arrows to Yes / No, and a series of options.
Anyway, I checked up whatever a problem was and went through the boxes till I got to “Consult your Medical Practicioner.” So I made an appointment. The questions from the GP sounded familiar, so I glanced over at the screen my GP was perusing. It was exactly the same flow chart. They must have done it as a programme. I just said, ‘Skip to the third column. I’m here.’
It gets worse. Since Covid our surgery asks you send in a photo of symptoms. Karen did with a growing blemish on her face. The reply said “AK. Below the threshold for treatment.” Still worried, she went to a private skin clinic, who removed it. They pointed out that (a) the diagnosis was completely wrong (b) you cannot tell from a photo, which is why they use UV light and a magnifier. We had already looked at the BMA book, examined the photos therein, decided it wasn’t AK, and got to “Consult your Medical Practicioner.”
Hit List
Jean Heywood – Dr Hubbard
Davies is again ahead of the curve in seeing this happening in 1986. What happens is you climb an incremental scale for sixteen years and become much more expensive to employ than someone on step one of the ladder. Banks were the first into this in the 80s, and employees who had been told it was a job for life were being pensioned off at fifty. Publishers and universities were a little slow to catch on, but they did.
In this case the hit list are older academics, who interfere with the modern running of a university by waffling on about irrelevant topics like education, research, student welfare, humanism … all anathema to Ernest Hemmingway, the VC. He has found a way to get rid of them. Until 1971, new staff were not subject to medicals. He will make it retroactive and get rid of the argumentative ageing ones … Dr Jock McCannon is a primary target. Unusually, Bob and Rose Marie are willing to work together to secure Jock’s dismissal into retirement.
The Vice Chancellor is continuing his courting of Japanese corporate investment … now it would be Chinese. He wants to offer them a base with their corporate name on it. There is a long history of billionaire benefactors, creating monuments to themselves from the tax money they won’t be paying. I benefitted greatly from our local library which acknowledged Andrew Carnegie on the front wall plaque. … there are several Sainsbury Wings at art galleries, museums and hospitals. Hull had its Gulbenkian theatre centre. Southampton University has its Nuffield Theatre. Think of Oxford and Kelloggs College (Are cornflakes compulsory for breakfast?). Or think of Oxford and its Said Business school. Wafik Said is the Syrian millionaire who brokered the huge UK-Saudi Arms deal with the help of the PMs son, Mark Thatcher. It now has a Thatcher Building, though is that named after mother or son?
The trouble is that historian Dr Hubbard is the warden of the university’s only women’s hall of residence, Fairlie Hall. It’s the ideal location for the Japanese. The Medical Centre must be persuaded to fail her in the medical. Stephen declines to do it.
The episode also lets us see a demonstration and occupation of a building against the university authorities.
It set me thinking about the publisher, managing editors and directors when I started writing for OUP. They knew they were supposed to sell books, but they justified OUP’s status as a charity. They talked about spreading education in English as a Foreign Language as a way of improving life for learners. They talked about education. They meant it. Alas, such men are no more. It’s all about selling books.
It also brought back two recent times on campuses. We arrived early at Southampton’s Nuffield Theatre one Saturday. The predicted New Forest traffic jam had not materialised. We had an hour to wander the campus. I heard Chinese, Korean, Malay, Arabic, Russian, but not one English speaker. It’s a campus I know – twenty years ago two of my children were there. They remember hardly any non-English speakers. Then there was Exeter at the start of term. Overseas students were the majority wandering the campus. It may be of course that near the start of term, the British kids feel confident about going into town on a Saturday night, while the new arrivals from overseas prefer to stay on campus. That will be a factor. These quiet overseas students don’t look the types for clubbing and vomiting in shop doorways on a Saturday night.
I spent my life in ELT (English Language Teaching) and I’m well aware that universities have expanded rapidly by becoming the top of the ELT pyramid. Publishers produced study skills books for overseas students at universities. They were asked for a lower level. Then a lower level again.
Universities have become a part of the ELT Business. They have created acres of Halls of residence with en-suites to meet the massive demand. Yes, it has many positive aspects. I’m not knocking it so much as pointing out that VC Ernest Hemmingway knew that was the future back in 1986.
Catastrophe Theory
Paul Jesson – P.R. Prettiman
Geoffrey Beavers – Sodd
Andrew Hilton – Soames
Kathy Burke – Alice, a student of German
Joe Melia – Dr Rust
The government inspectors are due, and Lowlands is facing a 25% staff cut all round. Four in the medical centre? Work it out. Worried lecturers turn up … Kathy Burke has a cameo. Joe Melia is Dr Rust, a worried academic, the Arts Council Fellow in Creative Writing. I had to laugh at that, as Malcolm Bradbury was my MA supervisor at UEA. He’s lucky to see Stephen.
Dr Rust: I seem to owe the BBC 17,000 quid, for reasons I can’t quite understand. So I decided to write off the debt with this little serial. About this place. The thing is, this place is crazy. Every time I think up something really outrageous, reality comes over and tops it. Any damned fool thing I think up really happens.
The screenwriter intervenes on his own behalf.
I also had to laugh at the terrified lecturer in education, who can’t stand the idea of having to go back and TEACH in a school.
Bob Buzzard: And you haven’t set foot in a real school, for what?
Lecturer: Um … 15 years.
Bob Buzzard: Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Well some would say you’ve got it coming to you.
Even the Vice Chancellor is scared, knowing that it comes from the top, she who they’re not going to name, the Milksnatcher:
Hemmingway: We gave her a doctorate last year … I didn’t throw the bloody tomato, did I?
This would have been right about the time Oxford University declined to award a D. Litt to Margaret Thatcher, in spite of her being a graduate. It did not endear the university sector to her.
Hemmingway has a classic mid 19th century carpet bag … which gave its name to carpetbaggers after the civil war, hoovering up the spoils and making a run for it. Lovely visual touch.
The inspectors are led by accident prone P.R. Prettiman. Not that it looks like he’s in charge, he has two waffling civil servants, Soames and Sodd (Davies had such fun with names … a cabinet minister and a respelled ‘sod.’) to appear to be the front men, while Prettiman wanders about looking into everything.
The Medical Centre will be due for cuts. Robert invites Prettiman to be thrashed at squash only to discover they were at school together, where Bob Buzzard bullied him. Stephen has a sympathetic drink with him. Dr Rose Marie goes all the way in using her feminine allure.
Meanwhile Chen has been offered a job at UCLA and his professor is busily trying to plagiarize Chen’s work. Lyn has been offered a job at Hendon Police College. They will be parting.
It’s brave of Andrew Davies to lose Chen, and the to get rid of Hemmingway AND more than anything to lose Lyn. Was he already thinking of a second series and keen on radical changes?
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DAVID TROUGHTON
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A Family At War TV series
