Doc Martin
ITV, 9.00PM
Now bearing the imprimatur of last series’ guest star Sigourney Weaver, Dominic Minghella’s amiable comedy-drama returns for the further adventures of Martin Clunes’s comically brusque and businesslike GP in the seaside town of Portwenn. The wedding looms of bumbling local bobby Joe Penhale (John Marquez) and impetuous nanny Janice Bone (Robyn Addison), yet an outbreak of a highly contagious virus, a case of kidney stones, a dose of prenuptial nerves and a curate with a baffling medical condition all threaten to scupper the happy occasion.
In the meantime, Martin and Louisa (Caroline Catz) continue to work on their marriage while attempting to decipher their son James’s first word, and Bert Large (Ian Mcneice) is met with a mixed response as he attempts to find buyers for his homemade whisky. The plots are wafer-thin (the mystery of James’s utterance is really no mystery at all), and the suspicion lingers that it would never have made a second series, let alone a ninth, without the spectacular Cornish scenery to gawp at. Still, this is harmless, mildly aspirational stuff, with enough self-awareness and gentle self-satire to keep it watchable. Gabriel Tate