Why Doc Martin’s become as painful as its kidney stone jokes
Doc Martin (ITV) gets its laughs in peculiar ways. Martin clunes returns as the curmudgeonly medic in the seaside drama, galloping through his cornish village like Basil Fawlty on fast-forward, to rescue a trawlerman with his hand trapped in a winch.
the gore on this show is never very convincing. it’s red ink for the light-hearted cases, raspberry jam for the dramatic injuries.
Even though this fisherman had his hand crushed up to the knuckles, there was just the merest trickle of ink. and here comes the joke — Joe, the village’s comic policeman, pressed the wrong button on the winch and nearly ripped the bloke’s arm off. Dear oh dear.
the attraction of this series has always escaped me. the Doc is a poor man’s Siegfried Farnon, from all creatures Great and Small — he’s an irritable misanthropist, prone to explosions of temper, but without Siegfried’s redeeming qualities of forgiveness and generosity.
His wife Louisa (caroline catz) is no more likeable, a walking spreadsheet of a woman whose emotional dial is stuck on ‘whinge’.
the beautiful backdrop of Portwenn, Doc Martin’s fictional seaside idyll, does make up for some of this — the sun’s always shining and the streets are never clogged with cars. that’s a fantasy with understandable appeal.
But the Doc’s infallible ability to diagnose the rarest complaints with one bad-tempered glance is even less believable than a cornish village with no tourists. this time he spotted a potentially lethal combination of blood thinner and australian antidepressants causing psychosis — even though the more obvious symptom was a massive head wound and a puddle of jam.
Perhaps since no one in Portwenn ever gets sick from a disease the Doc has previously treated, he is deliberately memorising the ones he hasn’t seen yet.
the show’s reliance on its stock characters has worn thin, too. We know that Bert (ian Mcneice) will be working some cash-in-hand swindle and Martin’s mother ruth (Eileen atkins) will be sucking in her cheeks like a woman whose acid drops are made from real battery acid.
John Marquez as Pc Joe was wringing all the laughs he could from kidney stones. Well, that’s funnier than a dismembered fisherman.
nothing Joe could do was half as grim as the real-life policing on The Detectives: Murder On The Streets (BBc2). this documentary series follows Manchester coppers over a year- long investigation into the killing of a 23-year-old homeless man. He’d been beaten to death and incinerated, surrounded by rubbish and filth under railway arches.
a second strand followed the manhunt for a paranoid alcoholic who had gone on the run after pouring petrol over his sister and burning her to death.
Perhaps to insulate themselves from the horrors of these crimes, the detectives speak in jargon. told that the killer has threatened police, one officer asked his boss: ‘What is your consideration regarding him proactively targeting cops?’
in a twist worthy of a Booker Prize novel, the murderer was under surveillance, but managed to escape when falling snow covered the lenses of the CCTV cameras.
However, he was picked up easily enough when an off-duty policeman spotted him at a railway station.
Meanwhile, the search for the arches killer had stalled, until a witness came forward. He sat sobbing and twitching in the interview room, throwing himself against the walls. it made for truly disturbing TV.