A Very Peculiar Series

After leaving Doctor Who in 1984, Peter "Davo" Davison made some odd acting choices in trying to avoid being typecast. 1985 saw him guest-starring in the BBC's Miss Marple, and then in 1986, still best known for playing a V. E. T. in All Creatures Great and Small and, of course, the Doctor, he took another medical role as Dr Stephen Daker in the BBC comedy-drama A Very Peculiar Practice.

In something of a forerunner to the style of Father Ted, Daker was the sane man surrounded by eccentrics, but only within the confines of the series' setting of Lowlands University - out in the real world, Daker's own foibles would (just as happens whenever Ted Crilly escapes from Craggy Island) make him seem as crazy as the rest of them.

Here Davo gets to show us that he is the master doctor of the comic technique of trailing off his sentences, leaving the second half unspoken, either because his interlocutor has already misunderstood him and has interrupted him before his meaning can become clear, or else because he has misunderstood them and is stopping himself when understanding belatedly dawns.

The series is a satire of university life in the 1980s, at the very heart of the era of Thatcher. Lowlands University faces constant budget cuts and the pressure for every part of it to turn a profit, or those not doing so may lose their jobs. This even applies to the medical team, where Daker is the newest member of staff. The other regular characters, then, are the other doctors - Daker's colleagues, but also his rivals.

The head of the medical department is Dr Jock McCannon, played by Graham "Soldeed" Crowden, a drunken stereotype of a Scottish doctor (back then you could get away with such things, it was the equivalent of portraying everyone from England as a football hooligan, or everyone from the USA as an overweight, loud-mouthed gun-nut with no knowledge of geography, history, or culture) lifted partly by the writing, but mainly by the gleam in Crowden's eye.

Barbara "Cracker" Flynn plays Dr Rose Marie, a straw-feminist whose attitudes can sometimes seem strange when watched from a distance of nearly 40 years. There's no laugh track on the series, which makes it tough to evaluate how audiences would have viewed her at the time, but it seems to me that we are expected to find most of the things she says absurd caricatures of real feminist positions. And so many of them still are ("illness is something men do to women"), but then occasionally she will say something that seems totally reasonable and uncontroversial, but which other characters react to in much the same way as to her extremist views.

Last, but by no means least, is the utterly tactless, would-be Thatcherite, Dr Bob Buzzard, played by David "son of Patrick" Troughton. This is the role of a lifetime for Troughton Jr, making the thoroughly unlikable character intensely watchable, and so Buzzard is the standout character of the series (yes, even up against the likes of Crowden). It's no wonder that he was the only one (other than Davo) to appear in every episode, up to and including the 1992 spinoff A Very Polish Practice.

In addition to the main cast, there are a number of noteworthy guest appearances. Timothy West is back for a rematch after having been in the same Miss Marple adaptation as Davo. John "Albany" Bird is a recurring antagonist - as the (it turns out aptly named) Vice Chancellor of the university, he is the one with power over the doctors' jobs.

And then in the final episode of the first season Joe "come off it Mr Dent" Melia plays Ron Rust, an author frustrated by his inability to write a script for the BBC, he is evidently a stand-in for the series writer Andrew Davies. His function within the show is to lampshade the implausibility of the events we see unfolding, particularly the eucatastrophe which the season ends upon.

The series succeeds best when Davies successfully mixes plausible scenarios familiar to viewers in the real world (the university's financial struggles, the office politics between colleagues, Davo's relationship woes) with a heightened version of reality full of exaggerated characters and surreal vignettes, such as the way every episode opens with the ongoing conflict (which is never referred to by any of the other characters) between the nuns and the scaffies.

It also has a very distinctively mid-80s title sequence and theme song. I'm left singing it for days after watching every episode.

Naughty Davo!