Between Doctor in the House, Doctor at Large, Doctor in Charge, Doctor at Sea, and Doctor on the Go, LWT made a total of 137 episodes of medical sitcom between 1969 and 1977. And I think it is virtually impossible to make 137 episodes of sitcom, without going a little strange at some point.
This is not a bad thing.
Take, for instance, the Doctor on the Go episode “It’s Just the Job” (TX: 8/6/75), written by Bernard McKenna and Richard Laing. The TV Times capsule merely promises us “another epidemic of of medical mayhem”. Which, sure enough, is true as far as it goes.
Unusually enough, the episode doesn’t start at St Swithin’s. Instead, we are at a busy careers fair.
LOUDSPEAKER: Welcome to Careers ’75. We hope you will all find something to interest you when you leave your schools. The civil service and catering stands are in Area 6, and the National Health display – including mock operations – is on Stand 3.
This busy careers fair isn’t done on location – it’s in the studio, in front of the audience, with a pretty damn good set.
And one aspect of this set is especially exciting for… well, people like us. Because it actually uses the studio walls of the South Bank Television Centre1 as the walls of the conference centre, which gives the whole affair a real sense of space:
Surely that is excitement enough for one episode. But things get even odder once we move on with the actual plot.
It being a careers day for school leavers, it isn’t long before our heroes start getting job offers too. (It’s almost like the writers have thought this episode through thematically, or something.) And when they wander over to the Charlemagne Hotels stand… hang on, what the bloody hell is that picture?
So, not content with using parts of inside the studio for the episode, they’re now using pictures of the outside as well? Cor.
Anyway, we must have had enough fun now. Those pictures are surely just a little in-joke. They aren’t actually going to use outside LWT in a film sequence, right?
Bloody hell.
And if LWT’s carpark is your specialist area of interest, even that desire can be fully sated.
But there’s something weird going on here, at least for the archive TV fan, rather than a typical viewer. Because all these little nods towards how television is made start adding up to something a little peculiar. Almost, you might say, a deconstruction of the three-wall sitcom. Because when we come back to the careers fair at the end of the episode, all those stands start to look like something a little different. Almost like typical three-wall sitcom sets, laid out in front of a studio audience.
Which, true enough, is what they are. But then you start to notice that the episode keeps panning between the “sets”, almost like a Python gag:
And let’s not forget that the co-writer of this episode Bernard McKenna has Python connections. And, of course, Graham Chapman and John Cleese have a solid association with the Doctor sitcoms, stretching back to the pilot in 1969.
Thing is, I don’t really think this is deliberate. I think a number of elements of the show have coincidentally come together, to make this look more than it is. It’s probably best to just wallow in the fun rather than go any deeper.
But the episode does have one final joke to throw at us. When Waring chases Stuart-Clark at the very end of the episode, he tries to make his escape… through the door in the National Health stand. The fake door.
Ending the episode with a joke about a false set. Hmmmmm.
I still don’t think any of this is deliberate. But the episode seems to be doing a damn good job at trying to convince me otherwise.
With thanks to Gary Rodger and his magical TV Times archive.
As it was called in 1975. The studios had been open for three years by the time this episode was broadcast. ↩