The good doctor/detective needs a cure for obnoxiousness
Doctor Blake Mysteries
THERE’S much to like about TV One’s new Saturday night Australian drama, The Doctor Blake Mysteries. It’s just a pity that so far, Dr Blake himself isn’t one of them.
It’s not just that Craig McLachlan – who has, after all, had a career composed almost entirely of playing doctors – still hasn’t quite cracked the old acting lark. It’s that this lead character, a war-damaged medic, is really quite unnecessarily obnoxious.
This is supposed to be at the heart of his appeal. An iconoclastic eccentric, he fearlessly confronts the stuffedshirt leaders of 1950s Ballarat, and for that good on him. It’s just that the way he does it seems puerile, pedantic and above all attentionseeking.
We first see him trying to inflict an arty nude painting on his gentlemen’s club, a pointlessly one-fingered gesture bound to fail. This is a buttoned-down society where the local hoon population are called nothing stronger than ‘‘tearaways’’ – and that deemed a shudder-provoking label.
A nude painting is not art but ‘‘feelth!’’ and Blake rightly deemed to be showing off.
But we learn that Blake’s harrowing detention by the Japanese, along with the loss of Tangiwai TV One. Another chance to see amoving feature-length dramatisation of the infamous New Zealand Christmas rail disaster. his Chinese wife and child, has damaged his psyche possibly beyond repair.
He is, though, a good doctor and a gifted sleuth who is permitted entry to the town’s criminal mysteries by the local police chief (Joel Tobeck).
If you can tolerate the hero’s humourless self-aggrandisement, the portrait of boondocks Australia during this era is a treat. As in the lovely A Place to Call Home, the affected starchiness of the self-appointed upper crust in post-war Australia is as entertaining as it is chilling. You can practically smell the corruption, only just camouflaged by the strident moralising of the local patriarchy. But as we saw in this episode, it’s the matriarchy you’ve got to watch out for. The murdering society dame in this first episode was such a commanding shrew, it’s a shame she won’t be with us for the season, but will be bundled off to prison.
The question is whether McLachlan – who admittedly did come briefly to life in the role when the good doctor took amphetamines in the cause of his investigation into drug pushing – can flesh out the smugly bearded one’s character to lift the series beyond the routinely enjoyable.