It’s rare for any television series to go unrepeated for thirty eight years, unless it was a victim of the BBC’s mass junking policy. Andrew Davies’ satirical campus comedy drama A Very Peculiar Practice arrived in the mid 1980s, in an era when TV archiving had come of age and drama series were retained as a matter of course. The series turns forty later this month, and to mark the occasion, BBC4 will, I understand, be repeating all fourteen episodes, including the seven-episode series two – which has not been seen on terrestrial television since its original broadcast in 1988.
I came somewhat late to the series, and didn’t pick up on A Very Peculiar Practice until a repeat run of the first series on BBC1 in November 1988. (The series had its first broadcast two years earlier, placed in a 9.25pm Wednesday night slot on BBC2, where it ran from 21 May until 2 July.) I don’t know what made me tune in, or even have a VHS tape at the ready, but I did. My laconic diary entry proclaimed it to be good. By week three (Wives of Great Men) my estimation had risen to ‘v. good – v. funny’ (this is one of the series’ outstanding episodes featuring a brilliant guest appearance from Timothy West as a hyper-manic academic). Week four (Black Bob’s Hamburger Suit) was ‘V.G!’ Bob Buzzard, memorably portrayed by David Troughton, was by now my favourite character in the series – utterly unprincipled, snide, untrustworthy, and forever reliant on his ‘rinky-dink computer’.
Bob (‘do you think you can manage Robert?’) is one of the doctors in the university medical centre where nervous young medic Stephen Daker finds himself, alone, newly divorced, and friendless. As he drives into the campus, baffling signs warn him ominously of 'altered priorities ahead'. Daker (Peter Davison) comes with a less than impressive CV (‘Birmingham, Birmingham, Birmingham, Walsall’) but a dedication to his chosen career that sharply contrasts the self-interested motives of his colleagues. Decrepit Jock McCannon (Graham Crowden) is head of the pratice; never far from a bottle of Glenfyddych, and often to be found dictating the latest chapter of his masterwork ‘The Sick University’, he treats all ailments as manifestations of psycho-sexual anxiety. Daker’s other colleague, Rose-Marie (Barbara Flynn), proves to be a tricky and manipulative uber-feminist. With each of his fellow medics pursuing their own conflicting and self-serving agendas, it’s left to Dr. Daker to find a path of least resistance that will enable him to do his job with empathy and understanding. But Daker has problems of his own, entering into an unusual relationship with mature student Lyn Turtle (Amanda Hillwood) that becomes a form of therapy.
This was more than just another campus comedy with a medical slant: this was dark satire, the blackest of black comedy, with an uncompromising message about the state of further education in Thatcher’s Britain. It was knowing, sly and even self-referential: in episode seven, Dr. Daker encounters a writer in residence who’s trying to write a drama set on a university campus but finds that real life keeps second guessing his outrageous plot ideas.
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Misleadingly, the Coronet books paperback of series one gave the impression that A Very Peculiar Practice had been a novel before it became a TV series... |
The BBC1 repeat run ended on 19 December 1988, and when another series of repeats was scheduled in April 1990, I expected this would comprise the second series: but instead we got a third outing for series one. Surely series two would follow on? ‘Not a chance, buddy’ (as Bob would have said). What had happened to it? In the end, I had to borrow some VHS tapes from a friend who had recorded series two on its one and only BBC broadcast. They were a bit fuzzy, having been recorded using the ‘Long Play’ format, but it was better than nothing. Watching them, I discovered that series two was even more on the edge than series one: the satire was now vicious where it had formerly been wry, and the outlook for the university was bleak, as an American Vice Chancellor arrived and channelled funding into secret defence projects, guarded by a sinister security force.
Series two received its only repeat broadcast on UK Gold in the late 1990s, where it was shown in edited form (the episodes in their original form frequently ran over the usual fifty-minute slot). In 1992, a film sequel, A Very Polish Practice picked up the characters of Daker, his new wife Grete and Bob Buzzard, transplanting them to a chaotic post-Communist Poland. Like series two, this also went unrepeated. At Christmas 2003, series one got a further repeat run on the new BBC4 channel, but once again, series two failed to materialise? Why was this?
A few years earlier, I asked Andrew Davies himself, when I had the chance of a brief conversation following a lecture he delivered at a literary festival. He admitted he knew of no reason why the BBC should have failed to repeat the second series, and no conspiracy or legal wrangle that might have kept it off air. Series one had been refused permission to film on the University of East Anglia campus, who were somewhat sensitive in the aftermath of the controversial 1981 adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, which was filmed at UEA. Davies’ fictional ‘Lowlands University’ was clearly UEA in all but name, but in the end, location filming was done at Birmingham and Keele Universities. To the best of my knowledge, Birmingham University wasn’t entirely happy with series one and refused permission for any further filming (series two lacks the brutalist concrete exteriors of the first and as a result looks quite different). If series one had ruffled academic feathers, series two was even more potentially controversial. Or maybe its non-appearance was simply down to the impracticality of scheduling a series where six of its episodes are 55 minutes long, and the seventh even longer.
The mystery of series two continued to rankle, not only with myself but my friend Tim Beddows, who was also a fan. In the end, it seemed that the only way we would get to see it was by releasing the whole thing on DVD, and this, ultimately, is what happened – although it took a long time to bring the plan to fruition. Network released series one in 2004, but it wasn’t until 2011 that a complete series DVD appeared, comprising both series and the spin-off film. I got to do the sleeve, and composed a desktop scene bringing together various elements from the series including Jock’s dictation machine, a glass of scotch, and a packet of the ‘Confidan’ drug that figured in the plot of Black Bob’s Hamburger Suit (it looks as if it were all photographed in situ, but the elements were, in fact, assembled in Photoshop). I don’t know if anyone got it, but the sleeve text was laid out in the manner of a piece of pharmaceutical packaging, an idea I ‘borrowed’ from the band Spiritualised’s album Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space.
To date, the DVD has been the only place where fans could legitimately watch both series (although, inevitably, there have been illegal online uploads), all of which makes the upcoming run on BBC4 something of a watershed. According to the iPlayer listings, episodes from series two ‘will be available soon’. So watch this space…
A Very Peculiar Practice begins on Wednesday 20 May at 22.15 on BBC4
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p032kkxy
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