A Very Peculiar Practice: a very modern campus comedy, 35 years on

Abstract

On May 21st 1986, the BBC broadcast the first episode of Andrew Davies’s black campus comedy A Very Peculiar Practice. 2021 celebrated the series’ 35th anniversary. This article provides an analysis of the contribution of the series to the genre of campus comedy. It provides an evaluation of the major themes, plots and characters introduced throughout the series and how these reflected, and reacted to, the political environment and ideology of the time. The series is discussed in the broader context of the campus novel, the genre of fiction in which staff, students and university management are satirised, and its contribution to the genre of television and film medicine/hospital comedy is also discussed.

Keywords:

• Satire
• campus novel
• university
• comedy
• academics
• higher education
• television

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr Ian Wilkie, Dr Nicky Brunswick and Ben Ricketts for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

G. Neil Martin

Dr G. Neil Martin is Honorary Professor of Psychology at Regent’s University London, former head of psychology at the University, a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the author of over 13 books on psychology including the UK’s market-leading introductory text, Psychology (Pearson Education) now in its 7th edition. He wrote The Psychology of Comedy for Routledge, published in 2021, was Associate Editor of The Psychologist, is an editorial board member of the Annals of Improbable Research, Consulting Editor for Teaching of Psychology, and was reviewer and books editor for Deadpan magazine, the UK’s first (and last) magazine about comedy. He has written over 150 academic and popular articles on psychology, including journalism for The Observer, The Times, Restaurant Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph, THES and the websites CuriousBritishTelly.co.uk and MovingPicturesFilmClub.com. His first broadcast joke was on Steve Wright In The Afternoon.