Doc Martin Christmas special review: A merciless torrent of schmaltz

Martin Clunes, having seemingly hung up his stethoscope two months ago, is back one last time for a festive edition

I don’t know when (or, frankly, why) they filmed this extra show, which is billed as the last ever episode of Doc Martin, but it’s landed on our screens just at a time when the NHS is in a state of near collapse.

To be fair to them, the producers wouldn’t have known about the forthcoming strikes, but the fact remains that in Dr Martin Ellingham’s idyllic Cornwall patch of “Portwenn”, no one ever gets all that sick, to the point of absurdity. I’m no expert on health outcomes in the South West, but this particular corner of the region has an unusually high incidence of comically mild ailments, and somehow Covid passed it by entirely.

I do get the point of comfort viewing, and ITV has long relied on such staples as Doc Martin as a dependable tonic for any signs of weakness in the evening ratings, but it’s maybe just as well that they’ve retired the doctor now before he became a bit of health hazard himself. You see, I had to get out for air midway through the Doc Martin Christmas special, so cloying was the unrelenting sentimentality. Kids, sweet old folk, cute dogs, babies, engagements, even a turkey saved from the abattoir – all were deployed in a merciless torrent of schmaltz.

My immune system’s cynical antibodies didn’t stand a chance. In fact, Ofcom should make ITV put a health warning on Doc Martin because I’m convinced that prolonged exposure to this saccharine show could result in the viewer contracting type 2 diabetes, and that’s even less fun than watching Martin Clunes ham it up for some very easy money. The Doc Martin character fits old Clunes like a latex glove, I’ll admit, but I just wonder if it’s done him, or the rest of us, any good.

What happens in Portwenn is, as ever, immaterial. Whimsical pensioner after whimsical pensioner displays disturbing symptoms that sound terminal, but whatever they have turns out to be relatively insignificant – heartburn rather than cancer of the throat. Course it is. One of them (Len the mechanic, played with admirable brio by Ron Cook) thinks he’s Father Christmas, gets drunk, and climbs up on the doc’s roof but, predictably enough, doesn’t break his neck: the lack of tension is palpable. The doc crashes his car in the snow to avoid hitting the stray turkey (as you do), gets hypothermia, and hallucinates that his mum has turned up and started slagging him off.

That’s quite a weird, edgy, though hardly innovative scene, but soon enough the doc finds shelter, recovers, dresses up as Santa and drives into the village to dish out pressies to the kids in the lantern parade. The old copper who stalks a much younger women for lols – surely illegal nowadays – gets engaged to her, and another couple, randomly, are going to have a baby. It’s all quite disjointed; really it’s not much more than a loosely tied string of vignettes of comical Cornish yokels, which is a bit too patronising for comfort. The effect is made even worse by the five ad breaks, ITV milking the Boxing Day gold-top for all it’s worth.

No one ends up going to see the oncologist or succumbs to long Covid in Portwenn, and Doc Martin never takes that final step into madness, even after the ghost of nasty Mama Doc Martin comes to haunt him. That would have made for a decent plot twist. Even the final scene, of the community Christmas tree self-immolating, is given a warm, jocular sort of treatment as we pan out of the pretty village. But, with Doc Martin viewers now finally getting discharged after 18 years under the doctor, we’ll never know if the inhabitants all end up in the burns unit awaiting painful skin grafts. I suspect not.