Doc Martin review: It’s just a bit too twee and Cornish, like Poldark with a stethoscope

Martin Clunes reprises his role as a seaside village GP in the long-running medical drama

The doctor will see you now: Clunes is back for a ninth series on ITV (Buffolo Pictures/ITV)

I suppose the problem with this first episode in the ninth – ninth! – series of Doc Martin (ITV) is that we know how it isn’t going to end. You see the Doc’s legendary rude ways have led to some poison-pen activity on his patch in Cornwall, and he has been reported to the General Medical Council for the crime of being sarky to the sick. So the GMC have sent another doctor up from London to “monitor” him and see how the doctor deals with his patients, which is to say without much patience. To Doc Martin’s credit – and he is played with the usual assurance by Martin Clunes – he makes no concessions to the rather officious and severe Dr Rebecca Hedden (Hermione Gulliford), and carries on talking in dense medical terminology and tells them to “shut up” if they start asking any awkward questions, or indeed any questions at all.

Yet, despite the element of tension, we all know that Dr Martin Ellingham is not going to be struck off by the GMC, because if he was, the other seven instalments of his rural adventures would have to be re-titled Ex-Doc Martin, and, presumably, reflect his efforts to find alternative employment in the depressed southwest economy post-Brexit. This wouldn’t be much fun to watch (or live through, as we may soon discover). We know, in advance, that he is going to control his fear of blood most of the time, because otherwise, he would have to throw the towel in as a GP, and that he is going to give his patients the right medicines and precisely the right level of care, as Doc Martin always does. Also, his patients rather like the way he refuses to talk down to them and makes sure that they do exactly as he says – and they tell the nosey Dr Hedden precisely that.

Yes, I suppose there is some interest, in a meta-sense, in trying to anticipate exactly how it could be that Doc Martin is going to avoid being struck off as a GP, and the writer, Jack Lothian, gives us the answer, but in a slightly over-elaborate way. First, the slightly odd village pharmacist/widow Sally Tishell (Selina Cadell) is asked out on a date by the rather wet Donald Abbott (Simon Chandler). The date involves them going for a day out at an offshore lighthouse. She falls down the stairs, then she accidentally impels her forearm on a screwdriver. They get Doc Martin out, but the idiot local copper manages to run the boat aground. Then the nosey doc form London gets electrocuted, the idiot copper gets electrocuted and virtually everyone is vomiting.

Finally, Doc Martin saves the nosey doc’s life by thumping her on the chest because her heart stops when she gets electrocuted. There’s blood and sick everywhere, but the strange scene has a jolly sort of farcical quality to it. To say it is unconvincing is, in a way, to miss the point, but that is exactly what it is. Even by the standards of undemanding ITV viewing on a wet Wednesday evening in early autumn, it is not quite good enough.

Overall, the whole thing is like an advert for Ginsters pasties, and just a bit too twee and Cornish, like Poldark with a stethoscope. There’s even a sequence where they start chucking crates of whisky off their sinking boat, a rather contrived, and pointless reference, I presume, to the classic 1949 Ealing comedy Whisky Galore! There’s such a sickly saccharine superfluity of yokel fishermen and sweet girls, cute dogs and pretty scenery that the viewer is in danger of contracting type 2 diabetes just from watching it. Doc Martin might be a grumpy so-and-so, with an inconvenient phobia about blood, but we know he has a beating heart of gold, and we don’t need a CT scan to see that.

The reason, I think, that the series has run for quite so long and with such undeniable success is the consummate performance of Clunes in the lead. Doc Martin, the man and the show, is ridiculous in every sense. It has a fairly weak pulse and is getting a bit arthritic, but somehow Clunes just keeps resuscitating it. I don’t think I’d want a repeat prescription myself, though.