“Collect a thousand loyalty points and you get a free coffin”
Creative impoliteness in the TV comedy drama Doc
Martin
The British comedy drama Doc Martin
is set in the fictional fishing village of Portwenn in Cornwall, where the
community’s only medical practitioner, Dr Martin Ellingham, is known to be
brilliant as regards the clinical aspects of his profession but totally
devoid of even the most basic interpersonal skills. He is habitually gruff,
ill-tempered and extremely rude to patients, and indeed to the entire
population of Portwenn.
This paper draws upon Brown and
Levinson’s (1987) pioneering study of face-threatening acts and
politeness, but also Spencer-Oatey’s more recent work (2007, 2008) on quality face, social identity face and relational face.
The concept of creative impoliteness owes much to Culpeper’s view (1996, 2005, 2011) of impoliteness as a phenomenon related to situated
behaviours that conflict with interlocutors’ expectations, wishes and
notions of what ought to be said or done during interaction. The aim is to
demonstrate how Dr Ellingham’s rudeness does not consist of unoriginal
insults or standard terms of offence – if it did, viewers would quickly
switch off – but involves highly creative use of language and thus serves as
the main source of humour in the TV series. In Doc Martin
imaginative script writers and a skilled actor create a character who in
real life would be insupportable, but on the TV screen is a comic
monster.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Asymmetrical power relationships in doctor-patient interaction
- 3.Towards an understanding of impoliteness and its comic potential
- 4.Analysis of extracts from Series 1 to 7
- 4.1Series 1 (2004): Starting off on the wrong foot
- 4.2Series 2 (2005): People coming back
- 4.3Series 3 (2007): The course of true love never did run smooth
- 4.4Series 4 (2009): Blood’s no problem
- 4.5Series 5 (2011): Leaving Portwenn, or maybe not
- 4.6Series 7 (2015): Anglo-American relations
- 5.Conclusions
-
Note
-
Data
-
References
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Data
Doc Martin Series
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Set. 2017. Acorn Media UK, ASIN:
B075J4G6T9.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Li, Ying & Wari Wongwaropakorn
2024.
Analyzing politeness and refusal speech acts in popular Chinese television drama series.
Cogent Arts & Humanities 11:1
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
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