Doctors has always been the underdog of the soap world. You’ll rarely see it mentioned by major publications, trailers on the telly, or teasers from the soap magazines about what to look forward to. However, when The Mill closes its doors in December 2024, it’ll bring to an end nearly 25 years of Letherbridge drama.
Doctors is quite unlike any other soap. You’ll get the weird, whacky, and sometimes the downright bonkers. You will ultimately find love, drama, and a show with a massive heart. Howard, Karen, and Heston’s exits were outstanding pieces of television.
Despite a real lack of publicity, the show has a loyal fanbase and is still award-winning. Storylines such as the rape of Vivien saw Anita win Best Female Dramatic Performance in 2009 at the British Soap Awards.
The 2021 episode “Three Consultations and a Funeral” was also a big win for Doctors, who took home the award for Best Single Episode at the 2022 British Soap Awards. The episode also won the RTS Midland Award in the Scripted category and was given a rare repeat ahead of a follow-up episode.
Doctors – The Early Years airs on Drama Channel every weekday morning from 8am. Catch up via UKTV Play.
How did you first get involved with working on Doctors?
I had been a professional writer for about 5 years, working on The Bill. Someone told me about Doctors. I’m afraid that I wasn’t familiar with the programme. I wrote to the show, sending them a sample script of my work. Thankfully, one of the script editors thought that I had potential and wanted to take me on. The rest is history! Doctors literally saved my career.
How would you sum up the show in 5 words for new viewers?
Everything from birth to death.
What storyline in the show’s history has been your favorite to work on?
I have two favourites. ‘Ticking’ was an episode that I wrote which created a whole new type of Doctors episode. We call them ‘lifesavers’ because they feature no serial story so they can be put anywhere in the schedule. (Tears for Souvenirs – my most recent episode is another example of this).
So ‘Ticking’ featured just one of our cast and a guest actress. It was a two hander and only had one, continuous scene. What was great about it was that the whole team got behind the idea from the beginning. Normally we write 5 drafts of each script, but I think this one was done in 2. It was just a pleasure from beginning to end. And when the final product hit the screens it turned out to be a special episode. (Ironically, because it featured the death of an old lady it was removed from the schedules because it was the same week that the Queen Mother died. But it was shown a week later.)
The other script that I have great memories of was the 75 minute episode I wrote back in 2003. ‘Say A Little Prayer’ was the first Doctors ep to win ‘Best Episode’ at the Soap Awards. Again, the writing process went very smoothly. Everyone in the team was on top form; from the actors to the location manager etc. They all worked hard to make it look fantastic.
If you had the chance to have any character return to see out the final episodes, who would you like to see one last time?
Watch this space!
When Doctors ends in December 2024, it’ll be just short of 25 years. What do you think has made the show so popular for viewers to keep coming back?
The beauty of Doctors was that we were able to tell such a range of stories, from comedies and fantasies to some very dark stories. I enjoyed making people laugh in one episode, then cry in the next. We’ve tackled subjects that other programmes just couldn’t deal with; the grief of losing a child, infertility, people trafficking, drug addiction; the list is endless. Because we had police characters we could cover ideas that could have been in The Bill. Because the show has run for so many years, it can be difficult to try and come up with something that hasn’t already been done, but this was just another challenge that inspired us writers to be more creative. I don’t think that the writers would ever have run out of ideas. It’s been great to have the space to deal with some stories over a longer period; i.e. the current plot of Al and his PTSD and also Al dealing with his mother’s deteriorating dementia. We did the same with Dr Nick, some time ago, when he struggled to fight back to regain his mobility.
The Midlands soap for many years had been Crossroads so how was it to have Doctors, another massively popular soap which the audience was loving, filming in Birmingham?
There are also the other shows that came out of the Doctors womb. Will Trotter, who was in charge of Doctors at the time, realised that there was all of this talent centred around Doctors, that it was worth trying to tap into this to see if other programmes could be created using the same ethos of Doctors – of making amazing programmes on a very tight daytime budget. It all started with Land Girls. Afterwards came Father Brown, Sister Boniface, Shakespeare and Hathaway, The Coroner and WPC56.
They were all made by the same production team based at the Drama Village in Birmingham. This gave Doctors writers, directors, script editors etc the opportunity to work on other shows. Often the shows were created by Doctors writers. These shows were also filmed in and around Birmingham. I am sure that Father Brown will continue, but how many other potential shows now won’t happen?
Has there been any stories you would have liked to tell but haven’t been possible to do?
Most of the restrictions on Doctors are about budget. It’s expensive to film at night. We have limits on the number of guest characters that we can feature. There are some things that we have to be very sensitive about, like suicide and violence. But there really aren’t that many limits of subject matter. We have tackled very dark issues. I have an episode on next year which is about as dark as I have ever gone. It’s called ‘Little Triggers’. I think that when you see it, it will feel more like prime time.
Doctors airs Monday – Friday at 1.45pm on BBC One
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