There’s a new doctor in the house with rural Australia providing the backdrop for TV’s latest medical drama.
Rural Australia provides the backdrop for a new TVNZ 1 comedy drama in which a high-flying heart surgeon is exiled to the country.
An intense desire to see a new medical series based away from the city has led to the creation of the new Australian comedy drama Doctor Doctor.
Australian TV producer Ian Collie says the idea for the series came during a chat with an international distributor at a TV market. “We were talking about Australian TV drama and one of the things that he bemoaned was that all the stuff is urban orientated,” says Collie. “He said that essentially an urban drama is an urban drama – they all start to look the same. Then he said our great selling points as a country are the coast and the bush. “So I started
thinking about locating a drama in the country. The medical dramas that we’ve seen of late have all been like ER – all city hospital, casualty wards and high-octane stuff.
“I also wanted to show that country towns had changed. In the past, we’ve tended to depict country people as a bit bogany, as bumpkins or hayseeds.”
The country town that is the setting for Doctor Doctor is Whyhope (better known as Mudgee, New South Wales, in real life).
Whyhope is the home town of cardiac surgeon Hugh Knight (Rodger Corser) and he returns there reluctantly. Arrogant and assured of his professional gifts, Hugh has earned a rock-star reputation in Sydney and lived a sex, booze and pill-filled lifestyle – until his antics cause him to be suspended and exiled to Whyhope to serve out his sentence as a GP at the medical clinic.
But his operating-theatre skills are not ideally suited to treating patients with flu or haemorrhoids.
Hugh doesn’t really do bedside manner and his view of general practice is dismissive: “A surgeon is a guy touched by genius and a
doctor is a guy who can remember a lot of stuff.”
But Hugh soon realises how much he doesn’t know as he is reduced to feverishly consulting Google – when the clinic’s erratic internet access allows.
Ian Collie, one of Australia’s most prolific and successful producers (Rake, Jack Irish, The Principal)
says Doctor Doctor is gentler and funnier than most medical series – and its location also sets it apart.
“For us, Mudgee is a template. It’s very aspirational. It’s all about food and wine,” says Collie.
“Whyhope has also changed since Hugh’s been away – it’s not all Anglo, there’s a diversity, and that’s part of the broader brush we want to paint.
“There’s a nod to the programmes of the past, but we hope to build something that’s fresh and distinctive.”
Dr Hugh is at the heart of the fish-out-of water story that also features his younger brother, Matt (Ryan Johnson), who has turned the family wheat farm into a successful micro-brewery and married Hugh’s ex, Charlie (Nicole da Silva).
At the clinic, Hugh has a no-nonsense boss in Penny (Hayley McElhinney) and a knowing ally in nurse Aiofe (Shalom Brune-Franklin), though he also makes an enemy of administrator Ken (Charles Wu).
So the scene is set for fractious family dinners and for Dr Hugh to learn more about life, death and the practice of medicine.