Farewell, Doc Martin – thanks to modern TV’s obsession with the ‘edgy’ and ‘dark’
Farewell then, misanthropic medic Doc Martin. Albeit not just yet. It was announced this week that the ITV comedy-drama, starring Martin Clunes as the local GP with a brusque bedside manner, will be hanging up its stethoscope.
After 16 years, 78 episodes and hundreds of mystery ailments, next spring’s 10th series will be the last. Dr Martin Ellingham will close his cottage surgery in the sleepy Cornish fishing village of Portwenn and grumpily stride off into the sunset.
With Doc Martin often repeated and in near-constant rotation on one TV channel or another, many people might be surprised that it’s still going. Yet it is surprisingly successful too. Episodes reliably pull in seven million viewers, figures which many more-celebrated series would kill for. At its peak a decade ago, ratings nudged a belief-beggaring 11 million, making it Britain’s top TV drama.
Doc Martin might be adored by its devotees, but it’s largely sneered at by critics and overlooked by awards judges. Why? Well, it’s not high art and it’s resolutely unfashionable. It’s cosy, undemanding and somehow immune to televisual trends.
It’s also a relic of a time when comedy-drama ruled and TV was just a little gentler – like sinking into a warm bath. Another reminder of this bygone era is the new remake of All Creatures Great and Small – like Doc Martin, a series where the ravishing rural scenery shares top billing with the actors. Reviving the James Herriot adaptation was a risky commission because the original TV version – which ran from 1978 to 1990 – remains much-loved. Yet rave reviews and ratings of 3.5 million followed, making it Channel 5’s biggest hit for five years.
These two gems, however, are genuine rarities in today’s TV schedules. Comedy-drama has become an endangered species. Instead, drama commissioners seem determined to feed us a diet of psychological horror, fact-based crime or nail-gnawing thrillers. So when did mainstream TV get so dark?
“Around 20 years ago” is the answer. The golden age of US boxset drama arrived at the turn of the millennium. The Sopranos and The West Wing both debuted in 1999, swiftly followed by 24 and The Wire. This purple patch proved a game-changer, predominantly in positive ways. Yet it led to an obsession with panoramic, po-faced sagas at the expense of frothier fare.
In Europe, this gave rise to a mid-Noughties wave of upmarket crime dramas. Wallander, Spiral, The Killing and The Bridge are all brilliant, but they’re hardly known for lifting the mood or warming the cockles. Together these two trends exerted a pincer-like influence on British TV. Spooks was basically a British version of 24. Series such as Broadchurch, Vera, Marcella and The Missing were essentially Scandi-crime relocated to the UK.
Meanwhile, the fiendishly clever work of writer Jed Mercurio (Line of Duty, Bodyguard) is undeniably superb but has set the tone for TV’s fixation with tense, twisting thrillers. Prolific writer siblings Harry and Jack Williams are the worst exponents, churning out attention-grabbing series which mainly wind up as forgettable misfires. The Missing worked well, but follow-ups like Liar, Strangers and Rellik were far less successful.
Our TV executives seem to feel the need to be edgy, daring and urban, while fearing fluffier output. They’re wrong. In any genre, there’s room for light as well as shade. During its Eighties heyday, comedy-drama was the dominant TV genre. Ratings-grabbers included much-loved geezer yarns Minder, Lovejoy and Auf Wiedersehen Pet. We had Tom Sharpe’s university satire Porterhouse Blue and Alan Plater’s gorgeous Beiderbecke trilogy.
Best of all, there was Andrew Davies’s A Very Peculiar Practice. By the Nineties, though, comedy-drama was beginning to fall from favour. Remember All Quiet On the Preston Front and The Riff Raff Element? There were still high spots, notably writer Mike Bullen’s Cold Feet, aka “the British Friends”. Nowadays, comedy-drama – or “dramedy” as the Americans clunkily call it – tends to be the domain of the streaming giants.
Sex Education, Orange Is The New Black, After Life, Dead To Me, The Politician (all on Netflix), Transparent and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (both on Amazon) all combine dramatic storylines with witty scripts. They follow in a fine US tradition for such genre-straddling shows, from M*A*S*H to Moonlighting, from Ally McBeal to Sex and the City.
Our own mainstream broadcasters, however, still seem strangely scared of it. Creators tend to get pigeonholed as dramatists or comedy writers, as if they’re mutually exclusive. Daisy Haggard’s Back To Life does combine comic dialogue with gentle drama but it gets packaged into half-hour episodes and marketed as a comedy. Peep Show writer Jesse Armstrong had to go to America to get his sweary super-soap Succession made.
Spy saga Killing Eve could arguably be described as comedy-drama. So can The Durrells (now sadly finished) and the work of writer Russell T Davies – his Jeremy Thorpe romp A Very English Scandal had a delightfully impish feel. Otherwise, the closest we’ve come in the past year was BBC Scotland’s superb but underrated Guilt. Comedy-drama, when done well, offers a catharsis that straight drama can’t – and for that reason we need to make more of it. Perhaps Doc Martin or James Herriot can write our TV bigwigs a prescription.
