I’m catching up with ITV’s excellent Doc Martin series, having missed out on it first time round. I’ve already caught up to 2007 so please don’t tell me what happens in the last series before I finally arrive in the modern day. It’s all good fun, from what I can tell, but I did wince at a few of the storylines.
One featured a man with psychotic tendencies, who ended up holding the good doctor at gunpoint. I confess the episode was funny at times, but the laughs came hard at the references, some from Doc Martin, to the man being ‘mad’, ‘mental’ and that he “should be sectioned”. Because it was well written and I think almost anything can be funny, a part of me thought, “Fucking hell. The joke here is mental illness. If I was mental, as the show described poor man, I might not want to go public about it.” Then, I thought, well I am ‘mental’ and I’ve already gone public. But this show was 16 years old and maybe things have changed a bit since then?
Next up was a child with suspected ADHD. The joke here was that the child was fat, that she was just poorly behaved and it was all her mother’s fault. Now it got very personal. As my loyal reader will know, I am awaiting an assessment on whether I have, and have always had, ADHD, PTSD, autism and Christ knows what else. And they made it look funny as the child surfed on the back of 4X4s and leapt on car bonnets. Again, this was 16 years ago. Maybe if Doc Martin had used this storyline today, they might be a little more sensitive? But then again, maybe they wouldn’t be, maybe they shouldn’t be; I don’t know. What I do know is that mental folk are regarded as wrong ‘uns.
If there is a terrible crime, surely the accused must have mental health problems? I mean, it stands to reason. Every time I have a bout of depression, I’m out on the streets with my favourite machete, causing havoc. Alternatively, I’m feeling so shit I don’t want to be anywhere at all. Which must mean I don’t have any problems at all?
Many years ago, I worked with and went to the football with someone who was regarded as extremely eccentric. “He’s mad, he is,” people said. He’d do wildly eccentric things and he would be wickedly funny. Then one day, we found he had killed himself. Turns out he had terrible mental health problems, which we didn’t know, or was it think, about. Now I look back and think, “He was mad, wasn’t he?” My experience – and I appreciate this is more anecdotal than factual – is that people with mental health problems are far more likely to injure themselves than others.
Part of Doc Martin’s shtick is that he is unemotional, uncaring, rude and crass, as well as being a brilliant doctor, which makes for often compelling viewing. The ‘mad’, ‘mental’ and “should be sectioned” bits were, as I have said, funny. The scriptwriter touched on a serious subject and made it funny. I’m not saying s/he shouldn’t have done that. It was just that the joke itself was mental illness. I don’t see that many jokes about cancer, but maybe that’s because few writers have dared.
So, it’s mixed emotions, I guess. I would never want to cancel awkward subjects and I suppose if I was offended, I should just switch off and do something else. I felt a bit upset but I also laughed. Don’t tell me whether the Dr Bellingham matures in the series’ to come. I rather hope he doesn’t. Sometimes, he’s right up there with Captain Mainwaring and Basil Fawlty stakes, with barely a saving grace, but thanks to the acting genius that is Martin Clunes, he always manages to keep back something to like about him.
And anyway, TV shouldn’t always be completely comfortable, should it?
