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Published on December 1, 2011
“A Very Peculiar Practice”
by MARK FISHER
A Very Peculiar Practice is a BBC TV series first broadcast in 1986 (season 1) and 1988
(season 2), with a one-off special, A Very Polish Practice, following in 1992. The show was
written by Andrew Davies, who later found fame for his TV adaptations of such literary
classics as Pride and Prejudice (1995). Long unavailable, the entire series has just been
released on DVD in the U.K. MARK FISHER looks back on this bleak satire of Thatcherism.
Much like his later adaptation of Michael Dobbs’s House of Cards, Andrew Davies’s A
Very Peculiar Practice captures British society in a moment of transition. Where
House of Cards caught the end-of-an era mood that accompanied Margaret
Thatcher’s fall from power, A Very Peculiar Practice is set during the high pomp of
Thatcherism. Centered on a fictional university medical practice, Davies based the
series on his own experiences as a lecturer at Warwick University. That institution
proved to be a laboratory for the new times; formerly associated with student
radicalism, by the 1980s it famously became Thatcher’s favorite university. What
Davies satirizes in A Very Peculiar Practice—especially the concerted attempts by
unscrupulous administrators and ambitious academics to link research to
corporate and military interests—is now taken for granted, and there’s a quaint
charge about returning to a moment when such opportunism could be the object
of mockery.
A Very Peculiar Practice. Courtesy of Network DVD.
It’s not only the presence of Graham Crowden (playing Jock McCannon, the
booming voice of a defeated radicalism) that makes A Very Peculiar Practice feel as if
it’s an updating of Lindsay Anderson’s 1982 film, Britannia Hospital. Both the film
and the series take a medical institution as the symbol (or symptom) of wider
Britain; both approach their subject matter with a grim surrealism. But where
Anderson’s film was formed in the militant heat of late 1970s industrial action that
culminated in the 1978–9 Winter of Discontent that ushered Thatcher into power,
A Very Peculiar Practice is set in a time when militancy has all but disappeared. The
series’ mood of profound resignation is startling. We are thrown into a world in
which privatization—of the university and the medical profession—seems
unstoppable. There is some resistance to the corporatiation of the university, and
the two business-orientated adminstrators who preside over the university
ultimately face defeat at the end of the first and second series, but their demises
feel like a hasty wish-fulfillment, out of keeping with the mordant atmosphere that
A Very Peculiar Practice creates, as if Davies suddenly remembered that this was
supposed to be a comedy.
A Very Peculiar Practice. Courtesy of Network DVD.
When the series begins, the alcoholic McCannon is notionally the head of the
practice, but it is clear that his time is over. The culture which shaped him—and
notably the politicized psychotherapy of R. D. Laing—has long been in retreat.
Whatever power McCannon once had is now faded: in an early episode, he
pathetically misdiagnoses a severe case of appendicitis as homesickness. Narrating
his book The Sick University into a Dictaphone, McCannon’s role becomes
essentially choric (sometimes, as in the opening scenes of the second series in
which he desolately trudges through a deserted, fogbound campus covered with
trash, it is as if he has passed over into an expressionistic, mythic world). The two
other doctors in the practice are Bob Buzzard (David Troughton) and Rose Marie
(Barbara Flynn). Buzzard is the very epitome of the Thatcherite man, impatient
with any concept of public service, hungry to transform the practice into private
consultancy, and absolutely untroubled by any concerns about corporate influence.
Rose Marie represents another kind of ascendant power. Polysexual, she refuses to
use a patronym because to do so would be a concession to patriarchy. She is a
manipulator who uses gender politics as a cover for an ambition every bit as
ruthless as Buzzard’s. Yet for all their ambition, Buzzard and Rose Marie are inert
figures, the energy of their Machiavellian scheming belied by their overwhelming
cynicism.
A Very Peculiar Practice. Courtesy of Network DVD.
Even though it is pretty clear that Davies’s satire is aimed at the exploitation of
feminism rather than feminism as such, the line between the two sometimes gets
blurred and this is a weakness of the show. Gender anxieties in A Very Peculiar
Practice are always seen from a male perspective. The young doctor who arrives at
the beginning of season 1 to take up a job at the practice, the troubled yet affable
Stephen Daker (Peter Davison)—a 1980s man who isn’t sure how a man ought to
behave—is very much the character with whom we are expected to identify, and
the women who surround him are almost always perceived as threatening and
unpredictable. Daker enters the practice with all the naivety and trepidation of K at
the beginning of Kafka’s The Castle. Much like K, Daker has an eagerness and an
enthusiasm which the other characters treat as a malady from which he needs to be
cured. Also like K, Daker initially finds himself struggling to establish that he
belongs in the strange new world he has entered. The practice receptionist assumes
he is a patient, while Buzzard makes it clear that the practice had wanted to employ
a more highflying figure who turned down the offer.
With the character of Daker, Peter Davison perfected his playing of a certain kind
of English leading male. (Davison’s BBC roles in the 1980s included The Doctor in
Doctor Who, 1981–84, as well as a long-running role in the rural veterinarian family
drama, All Creatures Great and Small.) Daker combines anxiety with an underlying
self-assurance. At the beginning of the series, his marriage has just collapsed, and
his new lover, Lyn Turtle (Amanda Hillwood), both feeds and assuages his anxieties.
In his dreams, he always sees Turtle running away, and Daker is ambivalent about
her sexual, emotional and economic independence. Daker’s bewilderment and his
apparent passivity make him a sympathetic character, but his likableness is
bittersweet at best. For, by the end of the first series it is Daker rather than Buzzard
or Marie whose career thrives. Daker is “modern” in the sense that, for all his
anxieties—or rather, precisely because of them—he can adapt to and succeed in
this new and hostile neoliberal world. In the second series, the English professor
who rebels against the administration’s latest philistine scheme describes Daker as
“a bit of a lefty.” but Daker is surely the very definition of a 1980s liberal: someone
who is “sensitive“ rather than an unreconstructed sexist, someone who is somewhat
sympathetic to radical causes, but who is in the end a pragmatist—someone,
ultimately, who will do whatever it takes to survive.
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T H I S E N T R Y WA S P O S T E D I N : Uncategorized
TA G G E D W I T H : A Very Peculiar Practice, Archives, BBC, Mark Fisher, Television
2 Comments
Dave
December 10, 2014