Andrew Davies (I)

Second novel by Andrew Davies, based upon his own hit BBC television comedy series.

Dr Stephen Daker returns to Lowlands University, newly elevated to head the Medical Centre in the swamp of fear and loathing. But Lowlands has a new American Vice-Chancellor, Jack Daniels. Handsome, blue eyed, virile, he has a vision of a Brave New University, spearheading the New Knowledge, but also embodying the great eternal values of the Free World. And not only has he the vision: he has the funding too. The medical team respond to new challenges, treating patients for such new ailments as malnutrition, industrial injuries, and Temporary Threshold Loss.

Dr Rose Marie, for example, funs a Male Sexuality Workshop which renders its male members incapable of further misdeeds. Jock McCannon, deeply suspicious of the new regime, finds that the sap still flows in his whisky-marinated old bones. And Stephen falls disastrously for Grete Grotowska, the abrasive art historian, an authority on the male nude but a pill in bed.

Andrew Davies's comedy is as sharp and funny as ever, but his vision of Britain in the late eighties is an alarming one. Lowlands University was dreadful enough as an exhausted repository of shattered dreams; as an Anglo-American success it is hilarious but terrifying.

First published: Thursday 24th March 1988