Andrew Davies’s campus medical comedy is sharp, strange and worth making time for. Its ensemble earns our attention, though its taste for eccentricity sometimes stops us caring as much as we would like.
A Very Peculiar Practice is a sharp, unsettling campus comedy that we recommend, with a warning that its appetite for oddity can keep the people at a distance. Creator and writer Andrew Davies takes the medical ensemble into a university setting, where professional titles offer plenty of opportunities for misplaced confidence. There is enough ordinary institutional life here to make the strangeness troublesome. Davies wants us to laugh at the people in charge without becoming comfortable in their company.
Peter Davison plays Dr Stephen Daker, the central figure among doctors whose shared profession gives them no automatic claim on our trust. Graham Crowden’s Dr Jock McCannon, Barbara Flynn’s Dr Rose Marie and David Troughton’s Dr Bob Buzzard give the comedy a strong ensemble. The pleasure is in watching such different comic presences occupy the same professional setting. Davison provides a useful centre without making the series feel as though everyone else exists simply to supply him with difficulties.
The nuns made us laugh, then left us slightly unsure what sort of programme we had agreed to watch. Played by Elaine Turrell and Sonia Hart, they are a concrete sign of how far this campus comedy is willing to wander from the expected. Their presence also helps explain its appeal. The strange elements make it harder to settle into the comfortable business of recognising a workplace type and waiting for the familiar joke.
David Tucker’s direction gives Davies’s writing room to be peculiar without making every oddity feel like an announcement. That restraint matters when a comedy already has so many competing personalities. John Bird, as Vice-Chancellor Ernest Hemmingway, extends the institutional comedy beyond the medical ensemble, and the university setting gives the series more to question than the competence of individual doctors. The humour is most effective when the professional setting remains credible enough for its absurdities to cause discomfort.
Our reservation is that eccentricity sometimes becomes an easy substitute for getting closer to these people. Davies can make us curious about a character without making us care enough about what happens to them. For a medical comedy, that is a meaningful limitation: some concern for the people involved is needed if professional failure is to carry any weight. The black humour remains enjoyable, but there are stretches when the programme’s determination to be strange feels over-insistent.
The two series contain seven episodes apiece, each running 50 minutes. That is a generous length for a comedy, and it gives the unease time to develop alongside the jokes. It also makes those stretches of emotional distance more noticeable than they would be in a brisker format. A medical comedy needs some prospect of care and competence if the doctors are to matter beyond their capacity to amuse, and Davies occasionally makes us wait too long for it.
Start with an episode when there is time to pay attention to more than the next punchline. We would steer anyone seeking a reassuring medical ensemble towards something gentler. For those willing to spend an evening with doctors they might hesitate to consult, we recommend staying.
