Andrew Davies' 'A Very Peculiar Practice', a drama about a medical centre in a fictional modern university, named "Lowlands", certainly shows its age: it feels like a low budget production, the soundtrack (and the haircuts) are very much of its era, and some of the dialogue is clunky - the students in particular seem poorly realised and acted (even though played quite a few subsequently famous names). Davies' obsession with nuns as a point of interest also seems somewhat strange. But the series is held together by some fine portrayals, and excellent comic writing, around the four central characters: Peter Davison's haplessly shy and reserved young doctor, Barbara Flynn's manipulative feminist, Graham Cawdon's hoary old drunk, and David Troughton's repressed Thatcherite Bob Buzzard. On the commentary of the DVD, Davies notes how in the original script, a hippie doctor occupied the place of Buzzard, and in hindsight, the change was perhaps crucial to making the series a success. For it's Buzzard who most clearly places the story in 1980s Britain, and connects the doctors to the wider issues concerning the university as a whole.
In fact, in his depiction of university funding, and the increasing need for universities to act with a perpetual eye on the bottom line, Davies (who spent time teaching at a university himself) not only gets the politics spot on, but actually makes a wider (and often unappreciated) point about the changes made to Britain under Thatcher. Public organisations were required to act with self-interest: one can call it efficiency, or the disastrous loss of the lofty ethos of public service, but it's striking and universal: today, many of the reforms proposed by the mad vice-chancellors at Lowlands University would seem routine to anyone who works in the university sector. In this sense, the drama is not so much dated, but astonishingly prescient.
The first series (of two) is the best - there are episodes that work as almost perfect sitcom, albeit of a very sly sort (and mercifully without laughter tracks). Series two isn't quite so good: the same themes seem to run through most of the episodes (and eventually start to wear a little thin), and the new vice chancellor's sinister motives seem less believable than the straightforward combination of greed, need, vanity and stupidity that drove his predecessor in series one. But overall, the series is a lost gem of 1980s television (although its DVD release may change that): funny, clever, and yet political. It's a shame that Davies turned to writing lucrative costume dramas and these days rarely addresses life in contemporary Britain - on this basis, he was good at it.
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