Doc Martin, Culture Warrior

SLIPPED INTO AUSTRALIA without fanfare three years ago and unobtrusively aired by the ABC at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, when A-list people are busy dressing for their glamorous nights out, the British television comedy series Doc Martin has become—boldly to borrow a phrase usually applied to movies about eviscerated, impaled and beheaded teenagers—a cult classic. To meet another Doc Martin cultist for the first time is to engage at once in a silent exchange of character and personality profiles.

Some among the shabby, Saturday stayat- home elite have let the idea of having their own cult classic go to their heads. When I murmured my intention of writing about Portwenn’s remarkable GP, I was cautioned that this might draw undesirable people into watching the program. My counter that no such persons would be found among Quadrant readers was effective

At first sight, Doc Martin seems no more than an adroit variation on a standard comic theme, the fish out of water.

Dr Martin Ellingham (brilliantly played by Martin Clunes, whose galloping waddle when in a hurry matches in stylishness the relentless plod of Alec Guinness playing John le Carré’s master spy, George Smiley) is an eminent London surgeon suddenly overcome by a phobic aversion to blood. The sight and smell of it make him throw up.

In despair about being unable to continue practising “the only thing I have ever been good at”, Ellingham sets up as a GP in the Cornish village of Portwenn, a post-Impressionist picture of rustic perfection, with a tranquil harbour enclosed by steep cliffs, and curving streets, lined with weathered but immaculate stone houses, climbing steeply to green woods and fertile farmland.

It’s a shrewdly chosen setting, giving an idyllic ambience to the somewhat macabre transmutation of a big-city surgeon into a small-town family doctor. Thanks to the jealous propaganda of physicians, we all know what surgeons are like.

There’s the joke, for instance, about the surgeon and the physician hurrying across a hospital lobby to catch a lift. They are almost too late but the surgeon separates the two sides of the closing doors by putting his head between them.

“Why didn’t you use your hands?” asks the physician (already knowing the answer, you are certain). Surgeon: “I need my hands for my work.”

There is also the claim that surgeons can’t deal with patients unless they are unconscious. There’s never much mention of the epic self-confidence and sense of purpose required just to penetrate the skin of a fellow human being with a sharp instrument—with say a needle to remove a splinter from a child’s finger.

You learn in the first episode of Doc Martin that Ellingham’s sense of purpose is unusually well developed when a bludging village dog tries to attach itself to him. Ellingham takes the dog for a walk and throws sticks for it to retrieve. He throws the final stick over a cliff. The dog, with its own agenda, does not pursue it. But the thought is there.

However, the key event in establishing Ellingham’s persona as a village doctor is his discovery, on opening for his first day of practice, of a waiting room jampacked with people drinking tea. His sexy but lamebrained receptionist is having a grand time playing hostess. (Ellingham’s predecessor, it transpires, had encouraged Portwenn to think of his surgery as a social centre.) Ellingham glares at this throng eager to view the new doctor, and snaps: “Anybody who hasn’t come to gossip, drink tea and waste my time, put up your hand.” Two or three hands are raised. “The rest of you, put down your tea cups and leave.” All exit—muttering resentfully, but exiting.

Ellingham’s bedside manner is best reflected by direct quotation:

“You are too fat. Go away.”
“You need surgery and may lose your voice, which has a certain appeal.”
“You are an ignorant person, so I will keep this simple.”
“… and I’m not going to give you anything for the chip on your shoulder, either.”
Patient: “Is it me or can’t you understand plain English?” Ellingham: “It’s you.”
“Have you a medical degree? Then shut up.”

Ellingham’s approach to community relations is also best described in his own words:

To a local radio interviewer: “I’ve got 1000 customers who do nothing but talk about themselves. Why don’t you interview some of them?”
“Portwenn has one doctor and 4996 people who know better.”
“It’s the village of the dammed.”
Village dignitary: “And how are you finding us?” Ellingham: “Irritating.”

Ellingham’s favourite word is no. It’s a toss-up between “shut up” and “get out” for his favourite complex phrase.

From all this, it might be assumed that Ellingham is a social cripple. He is, and to some extent, also an emotional cripple, the result, it emerges, of childhood neglect by narcissistic parents. However, the quality that subsumes all else is his excellence as a doctor—on familiar terms with all parts of the human body, a brilliant and decisive diagnostician, a resourceful healer, capable of tour de force improvisation in emergencies, and with a powerful commitment to saving and preserving life. He even overcomes his aversion to blood when he has to, pausing in his work to throw up into any receptacle that’s handy.

Ellingham is dedicated to the profession of medicine. Hassled by a doctor turned medical bureaucrat, he tells him: “You are a self-important, obstructive moron,” and later, with lethal scorn, “You eunuch!”

When a professor of something or other from the University of North Cornwall—a sleekly satirical reference to an institution that doesn’t actually exist but is on the real-life planning schedules of the sort of authorities that scatter universities in all directions—claims fraternity on the grounds that they both have doctorates, Ellingham snarls: “How many patients have you got in your waiting room?”

ALL THIS MAY LEAD some people to think that Portwenn deserves kinder treatment. But they are wrong. It doesn’t. Behind its idyllic façade, Portwenn is not just irritating. It is severely dysfunctional. (Some undiscriminating critics say it is Doc Martin who is dysfunctional but he is just neurotic; he functions admirably, if with an effort.)

Portwenn’s community leaders include a woman pharmacist who makes medical diagnoses and considers a doctor’s prescription a go-ahead to provide as many repeats as her customers want; an incompetent plumber and inveterate entrepreneur who poisons the village with bottled “mineral” water taken from a spring polluted by a dead sheep; a grande-ish dame who so overdoses on oestrogen to keep her sex life charged up that her husband, a truculent retired colonel, develops breasts; the local radio hostess, whose queenly on-air malice is complemented by a drinking problem that makes her the most dangerous driver in town.

Among residents Portwenn takes for granted is a forest warden who believes he is sharing his house with a giant talking squirrel and who puts a very twitchy finger to his shotgun trigger; and a man so gobsmacked by his wife’s leaving him that he wears women’s clothes and pretends to be her, so he can disbelieve the desertion.

“When did inbreeding start here?” a supercilious visiting doctor asks. (Naturally, Ellingham will not put up with so slovenly a diagnosis. The young doctor has come to ask for a recommendation to the head of a hospital surgical unit, from whom he wants a job. “I’ve already spoken to him,” Ellingham responds. “He thinks you are an arse and I think you are an arse.”)

There’s nothing genetically the matter with the villagers of Portwenn. Their striking rate of complete nutters is no higher, I imagine, than the world average. Most are intrinsically likeable human beings. But they are set in their ways, including—perhaps especially— ways that are bad for them. Moreover they are totalitarian in their insistence that newcomers and outsiders conform to the Portwenn mindset.

When, for example, his receptionist takes down a name but neither address nor telephone number nor nature of an emergency call, Ellingham—after tracking down the victim in time to save his life—fires her. The town boycotts him. He cannot get a meal at the village café, cannot fill his car’s tank at the petrol station. A grisly crowd of teenage girls harass him outside his surgery. His waiting room is empty. His receptionist may be a dimwit and a danger to public safety but she is a Portwennian. Her family is long-established Portwennian. Her hormones, which cause her to dream of sex while answering life-or-death phone calls, are Portwennian.

The obvious explanation for Portwenn’s social and cultural grottiness is isolation. It has few visitors, virtually no tourists. (By contrast, Port Isaac, the real Cornish village that’s the site of location filming for the series, nowadays thrives on Doc Martin tourism.) Birdwatchers would come in greater numbers to look at the breeding nests in the Portwenn cliffs but the truculent colonel drives them away by shooting at them (Ellingham appears to be the only male resident of the village without a shotgun).

Portwenn, it is to be assumed, has been cut off from outside influence, or chosen to cut itself off, for generations. The villagers believe they have found Utopia and will tolerate no meddling with the status quo. Having to go a doctor for personal repairs—especially a doctor so crassly scornful of the Portwenn zeitgeist—is seen by some as a nasty tear in the fabric of their perfect society; they habitually lie or are evasive about their symptoms. The fact that Ellingham invariably sees through their cover-ups makes him an even more alarming intruder, despite their feeling much better, not to say still alive, after he treats them.

Ellingham is clearly aware of the general rattiness of idylls designed by coercive utopians. He implacably resists efforts to boil him down into an ingredient of Portwenn’s messiness. He persistently points out that his name is Ellingham, not “Doc” or “Doc Martin”. His answer to Portwennians who ask if they may call him “Martin” is “No”. He brusquely refuses social invitations.

Will Portwenn wear down this heroic man? That’s the thread of suspense running through the series. Coercive utopians and other ideologues know how to put on an attractive face. Though his armour is tough, Ellingham is not invulnerable.

Louisa, the attractive village school principal, has been away to university and to practise her profession. However, she is a Portwennian and, although she sees the flaws in Portwenn’s ways, she is inclined to go along with them. You could say she prefers negotiation, even if it takes a lifetime, to confrontation. However, Ellingham has laid it on the line to her: “I say what I think and have no predisposition to the convenient untruth.” Louisa seems to accept this and falls in love with the doctor for sound reasons after observing the frantic passion he brings to a struggle to save a woman’s life.

As I completed this essay, Doc Martin and Louisa seemed about to get married. I guess it’s a union on which I can bestow a guarded blessing.

IS PORTWENN merely Portwenn or is it a microcosm? Elites look for more in their cult classics than entertaining soap opera.

Doc Martin’s clunky beginnings and the background of the program’s creator, Dominic Minghella, give a certain legitimacy to the microcosm theory.

The series began in 2000 as a two-hour tele-movie, two movies a year being planned for at least three years. They were designed as starring vehicles for Martin Clunes. His character was then called Dr Martin Bamford. Two movies were made, but they didn’t click. Judging from remnants of the reviews still traceable through Google, they lacked conflict and tension. The London doctor and the villagers just bumped uncomprehendingly against each other—fish-out-of-water comedy at its simplest. Dr Bamford was a rather hapless bloke.

Minghella, then aged thirty-five, was brought in to fix the scripts. He had been writing for radio and televsion since he was twenty-three, without drawing undue attention to himself, deeply in the shadow of his elder brother, the late film director and writer, Anthony. Happily for the future of Doc Martin, the Minghellas come from the Isle of Wight. One doesn’t have to know a lot about the culture of island communities to suspect that the Wighters were not altogether at ease with Oxford graduates who flounced around in London show business—nor that Dominic and Anthony were not in perfect harmony with the Wighters, despite their family’s being Island establishment.

So it was not from nowhere that Dominic Minghella drew the inspiration to give adversarial character to the fish-out-of-water village doctor. Clunes was so smitten by the idea of turning nasty that he got what Minghella described as “a brutal new haircut” better to suit the part. Having turned his doctor into an aggressor, Minghella needed more than quaint yokels for him to be aggressive to. Thus the slightly sinister undercurrent with which he has invested Portwenn, and his unflinching portrayal of Portwenners as, collectively, a menace to civilisation.

Since he has a large number of relations on the Isle of Wight and would probably like to visit them from time to time, I doubt that Minghella has been too literal in drawing from his observations there in order to populate Portwenn. He is likely to have met far more overbearing, tunnel-visioned, thick-wittedly complacent models for his characters in London.

Is perception of consciously structured universality in Doc Martin and Portwenn just wishful thinking? Not in my view. In any case, it is within the brief of alert viewers to award universality to them by identifying situations in their own eco-system where Portwenn is rampant and it’s time to call Doc Martin.