Doctors and the trouble with the BBC

The BBC’s daytime soap Doctors will soon vanish from our screens after 24 years. But while the final episodes make for excruciatingly bad television, they are worth watching for a simple reason: they encapsulate everything that is wrong with modern television.

The BBC’s obsession with ramming progressive storylines down viewers’ throats is plain to see in each episode of Doctors. Take the character of Dr Graham Elton (Alex Avery); he’s a rotten bigot and, in case you didn’t realise it, viewers are reminded of just how awful and unsound his views are in almost every scene.

From BBC medical soap opera Doctors. A new doctor, Graham, has joined the surgery. He's ableist and clumsy about homosexuality. And if the viewer hasn't realised he's a bigot, he then reveals he doesn't care about a patient's 'they / them' pronouns, only on treating 'him' pic.twitter.com/TJrdE5v02u

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) September 24, 2024

Graham is an equal opportunities ‘bigot’, guilty of every ‘ism’ going. He is, inevitably, a white, middle-class heterosexual man. He treats the very short female administrator Kirsty with puns and amused contempt. He fumbles over the terminology of gay and ‘queer’ with his colleague Dr Al Haskey. In one indescribably bad scene, he gets into a big tizzy over pronouns with the gay male nurse Luca, calling it ‘woke nonsense’.‘We’ve got to move with the times, language evolves, it’s nothing to be upset about,’ says voice-of-reason Dr Haskey a little later. So that’s all right then.

Luca decides to revenge himself by changing the sex on evil Dr Elton’s staff records. ‘How did it make you feel – undermined? Undervalued? Like your identity was irrelevant? Now you know how offensive it is to be misgendered – maybe you won’t do it again’. Dr Evil is furious. The more likely response, a pitiful shrug, is eschewed. So he is sent on an LBTQIA+ refresher course. It’s all marvellously 2018, pre-Cass, pre-‘Isla Bryson’, pre-Labour admitting their Women’s Declaration back into conference.

A lot of TV is bad; but that won’t prepare most first-time viewers for just how dreadful Doctors is. Almost all of the scenes are excruciating; they are reminiscent of the ‘Bureau de Change’ segment in The Day Today, or the one-off 90s revival of Acorn Antiques, in which Victoria Wood marvellously skewered soaps tackling ‘issues’ (Mrs Overall even came out). Doctors is schematic, obvious and clunking; hilarious, but for all the wrong reasons. This is television at its nadir; it serves to lecture and teach viewers, not entertain them.

Things haven’t always been this way. I grew up watching soaps and later worked on them for many years. In the 1990s and 2000s, millions tuned in to watch these shows. They did so because soaps had the power to enthral those watching. Soaps might make you feel happy, or sad; but, at the very least, you could relate to characters in the show. Doctors shows that not everyone who works in television sees it as their mission to entertain; instead they think their mission is to educate.

In my day of screenwriting in the pre-internet era, when you were commissioned you’d often get a big wedge of research, background details – legal, medical, etc – on whatever stories the show was running. This typically came from charities and professional bodies. Such information could be useful but also dangerous; it could sometimes lead to ‘soap professional disease’, where characters become walking, talking pamphlets. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the scriptwriters in Doctors have swallowed such information whole.

As a result, Doctors offers up stilted, compliant, didactic stuff, like a HR training video. It treats viewers as idiots; it’s as if the BBC think people watching TV during the daytime don’t deserve any better. These scenes would be struck out of the script of a decent children’s programme with an audience older than the tiniest of tots. Doctors has all the dramatic elan of those times in Rainbow when Zippy would get out of hand – eat all of Bungles’s sweeties, for example – and learn a valuable lesson. Taking a highly contentious political issue like the gender wars and conflating objection to pronouns with hostility to a disabled person, as if the two things were remotely comparable or adjacent, is despicable.

The Writers’ Guild made an enormous fuss about Doctors folding, saying the show was a vital training ground for fresh TV talent. They were right, kind of. Doctors has featured household names such as Eddie Redmayne, Sheridan Smith, Nicholas Hoult, Rustie Lee and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. But that roster of talent doesn’t mean Doctors deserved to avoid the chop. With its antiquated production, tiny budget and quaint air of ‘that’ll do’, it reminds me of how the shoddy end of television used to be made, 40 years ago, before the industry was professionalised. To make matters worse, a dollop of politically correct nonsense is served up on top.

All is not lost. There are signs of life elsewhere on TV – and in soaps. ‘I haven’t time for gender identity, I’m up at five for t’papers,’ Rita in Coronation Street said recently. What a relief to hear such common sense. Doctors’ scriptwriters could learn a thing or two.

Soaps are, of course, all fantasies. But lose any link at all to reality and you lose everything. It’s a mercy that the BBC have arranged an assisted dying for Doctors. Now they just need to find a cure for the rest of their twaddle-riddled output.