Storyline
The series is a black comedy with surreal elements. It concerned an idealistic young doctor, Stephen Daker (Peter Davison), taking up a post as a member of a university medical centre. The centre is staffed by a group of misfits including the bisexual Rose Marie (Barbara Flynn), self-absorbed Bob Buzzard (David Troughton), and decrepit Scot, Jock McCannon (Graham Crowden) who heads the team. One of the themes of the series is the increasing commercialisation of higher education in Britain following the government cuts of the early 1980s, with the Vice-Chancellor Ernest Hemmingway (John Bird) trying to woo Japanese investors in the face of resistance from the academic old guard. Hugh Grant made one of his first television appearances as an evangelical preacher; Kathy Burke also had a bit part. In the second series an American Vice-Chancellor Jack Daniels (Michael Shannon) took over from Hemingway, continuing the running joke of naming the VC after an American.
In the first series, Daker had a romance with a policewoman, Lyn Turtle (Amanda Hillwood), who rescued him from drowning in the university's swimming pool. In the second series broadcast in 1988, Daker's love interest was a visiting Polish academic Grete Grotowska (Joanna Kanska). In a sequel film, A Very Polish Practice (1992), Daker went to live with her in Poland, where he struggled with the former Communist country's antiquated health service.
Lowlands University (the fictional institution at which the series was set) was based on the University of East Anglia campus near Norwich. The BBC wanted to feature the UEA campus in the programme's credits but the University refused permission. The locations for the series' pre-filmed sequences were the universities of Keele and Birmingham. Also used for exterior filming was the BT engineer training school in Staffordshire. The selection of UEA by the producers was not unintentional as it was the base for Malcolm Bradbury, to whose development of the British campus novel the series is much indebted. Most of the interiors were shot at BBC Pebble Mill (first series) and in London (second), in the then common combined film/video format.
The series had its genesis in writer Andrew Davies discovering that he owed the BBC approximately £17,000. This was due to him being commissioned and paid to write a TV project that he did not deliver. Davies decided that the best means of paying the debt was to write a new series, which became A Very Peculiar Practice. In a deliberate case of art imitating life, the final episode of the first series introduces a character named Ron Rust, a writer who, for reasons that he doesn't quite understand, owes the BBC £17,000 and who is trying to write a black comedy about a university in order to pay the debt off.
The theme tune, "We Love You" was written by Dave Greenslade and performed by UK singer, Elkie Brooks.
The first series was released on DVD (Region 2) in the UK in 2004. A DVD set of the first and second series, along with A Very Polish Practice, was released in the UK during October 2011. Davies novelised both series in two books: A Very Peculiar Practice (1986, Coronet) and A Very Peculiar Practice: The New Frontier (1988, Methuen).
Read more about this topic: A Very Peculiar Practice