Doctor In The House

Top-notch comedy series whose memory was devalued by later spin-offs including an ill-advised revival (Doctor at the Top) in 1991. Mind you, with an original scriptwriting team that included John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Jonathan Lynn, (Chapman and Garden were both qualified doctors themselves) you would expect nothing less.

This sitcom was based on Richard Gordon's series of books and had previously been adapted for the cinema starting with a 1954 production starring Dirk Bogarde as medical student Simon Sparrow. Frank Muir, then head of comedy at the newly formed ITV franchise LWT commissioned the series under Gordon's watchful eye according to the TV Times (July 12, 1969), which starred Barry Evans as the lead character, now named Michael Upton.

To accompany him were an assortment of unlikely students including Geoffrey Davies as the posh and sometimes snooty -but always work-shy, Dick Stuart-Clark, Robin Nedwell as Duncan Waring (the character took centre stage after Evans left the series in 1972) and George Layton as Paul Collier. Opposition came in the form of Richard O'Sullivan as the whimpish and slimy Laurence Bingham who was always buttering up to his superiors, not least of all Professor Geoffrey Loftus (Ernest Clark) who was the TV equivalent to James Robinson-Justice's Sir Lancelot Spratt in the cinema. The action took place within the fictitious walls and wards of St Swithin's whilst exterior scenes were shot outside true-life Wanstead Hospital (long since converted into residential apartments).

This marked Barry Evans’ first major role. He was born in Guildford, Surrey, to Ruby Evans—who was unmarried—and an unidentified father. Evans lived with his mother until the age of four, when he was placed first in a residential nursery and later in an orphanage. Ruby had become engaged, and subsequently married, John Balch, who refused to raise another man’s child. With Evans’s grandmother unable to take on his care, he was left without a family home and never saw his mother again.

He starred in 55 episodes of Doctor in the House/Doctor at Large before moving on to another hit sitcom, Mind Your Language in 1977 where he starred as an English teacher to a group of foreign students. But when that series finished in 1986 he found it hard to find work. It was seven years before he appeared on screen again in a minor role in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

In February 1997, police discovered Evans’s body in his living room after visiting to inform him that his stolen car, reported missing the previous day, had been recovered. The circumstances of his death remain unresolved. The coroner noted a head injury and high levels of alcohol in his system. A brief will lay on a nearby table, and a spilled packet of aspirin—bearing a pre-decimalisation price label, meaning it was at least 26 years old—was found on the floor, though the coroner determined he had not taken any tablets. An open verdict was recorded.

Guest stars in the Doctor series included David Jason, James Beck and Susan George, whilst Martin Shaw appeared as a regular character in season one and Jonathan Lynn (who went on to co-write the superb Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister) did the same in season two. However, and perhaps more significantly, in series three (by now re-titled Doctor at Large), John Cleese included in one of his scripts a rather rude hotel keeper. One of the writers on that series, Bernard McKenna remembers: "I was at a dress rehearsals at LWT sitting with H. Barclay and J. Cleese for (the) episode about a bonkers hotel manager that Upton (Barry Evans) was having problems with when the producer Humphrey Barclay said to John, 'There's a series in that hotel owner'...I remember John being sceptical! The rest is history..."