This moving final episode proved it – British TV will be poorer without Doctors
We’ve been through the mill over the years with Doctors, the daytime medical soap – sorry, continuing drama – that has left no abscess unlanced during 23 years of plundering the medical dictionary for crisis-based storylines.
The peculiar thing is, it was only when the BBC handed Doctors its own terminal diagnosis that it got the credit it was long overdue. Actors, writers, directors, costume designers, make-up artists… There aren’t many working in British TV today who didn’t cut their teeth cranking out a fast-turnaround half-an-hour set in Letherbridge’s Mill clinic.
Doctors to depart? A classic case of not knowing what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. Sure, Doctors was never going to challenge Wolf Hall at the Baftas. But in a daytime world increasingly swamped by endless cheap gameshows and identikit consumer faff, the series stood out like a beacon of creativity. Slightly naff, yes, the acting a tad creaky at times, but by weaving in topical issues and an encyclopaedia of medical issues, it connected with an audience overlooked by prestige-crazed streaming services that throw millions at overheated dramas that disappear up their multiple time frames.
In a final week – seriously underplayed by the BBC – that poignantly included the late Timothy West turning in a priceless cameo as a grumpy neighbour (laughing adversity in the face and expressing a desire to “Go out dancing”, a fitting epitaph), we got the best and worst of Doctors.
The last-ever episode stayed true to its roots, throwing in a baby-birth crisis and a spot of ear wax irrigation (yum) to keep us on our toes as ends were tied right, left and centre. But the real deal saw the volatile Dr Zara (Elisabeth Dermot Walsh, coming over all Shakespearean), having miraculously recovered from tumbling down the stairs just the day before, bid to outsmart the toxic Dr Elton, a human beancounter, and save her beloved Mill from his evil ways.
The knives, none too subtly, were clearly being thrown at BBC beancounters – the same beancounters who dished out a measly 25 minutes for Doctors: A Celebration, which followed the final episode. That’s one minute, give or take, per year of transmission. But at least it found room for Christopher Timothy, Doctors’ very first doctor. Much has been made of the now-famous faces who found a foothold on the acting ladder thanks to Doctors.
Would there have been a Fleabag had Phoebe Waller-Bridge not got the nod? Would Eddie Redmayne be Day of the Jackaling right now if he hadn’t flopped his fringe as a stroppy teen? And would Jodie Comer have missed out on global success as Villanelle in Killing Eve if she’d been passed over for the role of a depressed teenage mother? Who knows. But what is certain is that Doctors has been a launchpad for a multitude of careers, maybe not all so glittering, but a solid grounding in an uncertain profession.
Without this easily derided show – and yes, in an age of big-bucks budgets it looked a little hand-to-mouth – those opportunities are shrinking fast. The final shot through the surgery window carried a simple message: life goes on. Patients milling in and out of the surgery as they had way back at the start. In a world as uncertain as the one we’re living in right now, prescribing a dose of optimism felt oddly moving.