- by Owen Morton
Some of you – I’m thinking you in particular, Dave, and I don’t really know why; it just strikes me as your sort of thing – may already be familiar with the social and cultural phenomenon known as ‘Doctors’. Okay, it’s not actually a phenomenon. It’s actually pretty bad. Phenomenally bad, to be quite honest. So I suppose it is a phenomenon in some way. Just not the way I originally intended. (Gosh, I am a master of prevarication, aren’t I? I’m uniquely skilled at getting off any given subject within seconds of getting onto it.)
This in mind, I will now return to the topic in hand. For those who don’t know, Doctors is a daytime television programme, that follows Neighbours’ first showing. (On a side note, which brilliant BBC executive thought Neighbours was so good it needed to be shown twice a day? I have never watched an episode of Neighbours I enjoyed, though I confess I do occasionally get a small twinge of amusement out of the name ‘Toadfish’.) Most people are probably aware of my feelings towards daytime television – if they’re not they can find out here – and Doctors has served only to reinforce those feelings.
My encounter with Doctors came in late November last year, just before I watched a He-Man episode called ‘The Shaping Staff’, which one day I might get round to reviewing. Anyway, my point is – besides my ambition to mention He-Man in pretty much everything I write, up to and including my History dissertation – that next to Doctors, He-Man looked positively sensible, nay, even intellectual. Any programme that can make He-Man look good must be dire indeed.
I don’t recall why exactly I was watching Doctors, though I have a vague memory of not feeling too well that day, which possibly goes some way towards explaining it. The immediate impression I got was that this was something akin to ER or Casualty – neither of which, I hasten to add, I personally enjoy, but I am aware that the former at least is generally respected – but I almost instantly discovered that if the creators of Doctors had either of these programmes in mind, they quite extensively failed to hit their target.
Put quite simply, Doctors is a programme, set in a hospital (or something very much like one), which attempts to give its characters true-to-life dilemmas to deal with. As far as I can tell, it fails – albeit in a most entertaining way – to do anything of the sort. My point can probably be demonstrated best if I detail the three separate plotlines that graced the screen when I was watching:
The first plotline concerned two people, who I presume were doctors, but could quite easily not have been (they weren’t doing anything terribly doctorish, at any rate), taking a car out to a wood. When they got there, they unloaded a picnic, and – in obvious violation of the laws of common sense – spread it over the car’s roof, and proceeded to begin eating. I was quickly made aware that these people had until recently been a couple, and he wanted them to continue being one, whereas she didn’t. Still, after finishing their lovely car-roof-top picnic, they went on several nice romantic walks and ended up kissing, which was, I’m sure, dreadfully pleasant for all concerned.
The second plotline was, I think, intended to be the comic relief, as compared to the heavy seriousness of the other two. Basically, it revolved around two quite insane-looking ladies, one of whom was really tall and the other really short, who, due to a rather monumental display of imbecility, had somehow managed to lose a baby somewhere in the hospital. This plotline centred around their general buffoonery as they attempted to locate the baby. The episode ended on this plotline, with the two of them running up to some man who I think was called Derek, as if for some reason they expected him to know where the baby was. He didn’t, and moreover his acting when he heard the news that the baby was missing was somewhere in between the regions of appalling and abysmal. He gave the impression, when he said, “Oh no!”, that he was in fact simply being sarcastic.
The third plotline, however, was probably the best that I have ever witnessed on any television programme, ever. You don’t get this sort of thing on He-Man, ladies and gentlemen. This was the plotline that was in progress when I switched on, and I quickly discovered that it was all about a husband and wife who’d been trying to get pregnant for ages (the wife had been, obviously, not the husband, otherwise it wouldn’t have been surprising they hadn’t succeeded). The wife had finally got pregnant, and the husband, wife, father of the wife, and a nurse were all whooping about excitedly.
BUT! And of course there is a but. Within minutes, the father-to-be was sitting around moping, for no apparent reason. The immediate assumption is that, now he knows he’s going to be a father, he’s not sure whether he wants to be. But this twist in the tale would slightly too realistic for Doctors. As it turns out, the expectant father is suspicious of his wife, because they’ve had so much trouble having a baby, he doesn’t think that this baby is his. His wife gets understandably annoyed at this, especially when, for some reason, the husband begins to insinuate that the baby is actually his wife’s father’s. This leads to the classic line, “Are you suggesting I had sex with my own father?” being belted out at quite exciting volume, drawing many interested observers to the television.
Ludicrous as it may seem, the husband was actually suspicious for a good reason. The baby is not his. And, to make things even more entertaining, it turns out the baby is his wife’s father’s. Apparently they used artificial insemination (because it would just be sick and wrong if they actually had sex, but it’s okay to do this) because their DNA is similar enough that it makes it more likely that she would actually conceive. Apparently. It sounded like rather dubious science to me, to tell truth, but there you go. (My friend Anton the biochemist had words to say about this as well, but they were all very long and I didn’t understand them.)
The remainder of this plotline was spent with the husband driving round and round, with his wife and her father chasing him, until he finally decided to be a right bastard and go to tell his wife’s dying mother all about it. This is the sort of revelation that would really push her over the edge and probably kill her. Fortunately for morality, he is prevented from doing this by his wife’s father. Then things begin to get heated and there’s an implication of divorce proceedings in the offing, but the episode cut at this point to those insane women and their encounter with Derek, at which point it ended.
And to be quite honest, I think I’ve more than explained why I like Doctors. You can’t dislike a programme so insanely stupid as this one. I think it should be aired more than once a day. In fact, I think there should be a channel given over entirely to Doctors. The best televisual feast I can think of would be a crossover episode between Doctors and He-Man. The obvious plotline to go for would be Teela becoming pregnant by way of Man-at-Arms. How good would that be?