Martin Clunes

We have been watching Doc Martin, a British TV show, about a stuck up surgeon from London who gives up his practice because of a phobia of blood to become a GP in a small village in Cornwall. Most of the humor comes from the fact that the doctor has zero interpersonal skills and is entirely incapable of telling anything but the truth and usually in a scientific/doctorly way which is usually unpleasant to the listener. Nearly all the remaining laughs are generated by some of the totally odd inhabitants of the smal seaside village, with just a few left over for the budding romance between the Doc (with which he has no experience at) and the school’s headmistress.

They have filmed 3 Series of the show consisting of 6, 8 and 7 episodes each. The first Series we rented from Netflix, but numbers 2 & 3 haven’t been released in the US as of yet, so we had to turn to Nigel who had copies available in the boot of his Vauxhall Vectra saloon that he could sell us. We are now down to the last two episodes of Series 3 and we will be finished. For now, they are working on a Series 4 that is supposed to start filming in May of this year, so maybe by the end of 2009 we will be able to watch those shows too.

Doc Martin stars Martin Clunes who is proof positive that acting matters more than looks to the English. While not what you would call ugly, more like eccentric, he won’t be making the leap to leading man in Hollywood soon. We have seen him a couple of times before, in William & Mary, a romantic comedy TV show and in Saving Grace, which ended up inspiring the Doc Martin TV show.

William & Mary ran for 3 Series and of course only the first two were released in Region 1 (the US and others). We ran through those 12 shows thanks to Netflix, but the last Series wasn’t available, even from Nigel, so we ended up buying the DVDs from Amazon in the UK. I was going to buy just Series 3, but a box set with all three Series were available for only a couple quid more, so I went for the set. Now I have to do some digital magic and rip the DVDs to my computer and stripping the region code. Then I have to burn them back to some recordable DVDs while converting them from PAL to NTSC. Wish me luck.