Free A Curious Career by Lynn Barber

through the window to his enormous steed Chester, and says they have another fourteen horses and some miniature Shetland ponies in the paddocks. He gets up at 6.30 to feed them all, and has spent the morning moving lambs up the hill. He calls himself ‘a luvvie farmer’ but he obviously takes his farming seriously.
    This bucolic chat is all very well, but I am dying to talk about Doc Martin . Unfortunately, Martin Clunes doesn’t seem to be. He says he wants more roles, different roles, he wants to do more acting. ‘Of course Doc Martin is acting, but it’s a particular kind of job because it’s our own company [Buffalo Pictures] that makes it, so it’s just very different from a normal actor’s life.’ He found a few years ago that he was no longer being offered parts, which is why he made TV documentaries (produced by Philippa) about dogs and horses and islands. But his first love is still acting. ‘I really want to get back to acting. I went up for a job last week – I didn’t get it. But I thought: Great! This is what I signed up for, you know. To actually go up for a part and they say choose some scenes to read, I really found it refreshing. I’m kind of sad that I don’t do it any more.’
    But this is so disloyal to Doc Martin ! Could he seriously contemplate doing a different television series? ‘Why not? I’m self-employed. Yes. I just want to do something else as well, that’s why I’m going to all these auditions. I want to go back to supporting and not having the whole thing on my shoulders, playing the title role. Because I’m basically a character actor who got lucky, you know. And I’m sort of preparing for the twilight of my career. I’m fifty and there’s no guarantee, no pension. And if you’re self-employed, you always worry about that.’ But he can’t seriously worry about money – his farm must be worth a fortune. ‘Yes indeed – that’s where all the money went! But I just need to do what I do. I only realised this year that I really miss acting.’
    Dearohdearohdearohdear. Luckily he has signed up for one more series of Doc Martin , the sixth, but he insists that will be the last. Sob. ‘It would just be such a contortion to carry on. It would get repetitive, it would become a soap. And we can’t keep the will-they-won’t-they thing going with Louisa now they’re together. They have to co-exist – though at what level of functionality, I don’t know.’
    Another problem is that they must sooner or later run out of diseases. The inhabitants of Portwenn have suffered from every obscure ailment known to medicine. They develop arsenic poisoning from their wallpaper; they grow breasts from ingesting their wife’s HRT cream, or break their legs from taking too many calcium supplements. And they frequently ‘go Bodmin’ from, say, cleaning their floors with weedkiller the way they do. (The Mayor of Bodmin objected to the use of ‘gone Bodmin’ in the script but actually it’s widespread in Cornwall because Bodmin used to have the county’s biggest mental hospital.) The very first time Doc Martin saw Louisa he looked deep into her eyes – and told her she had glaucoma. But glaucoma is a very minor ailment by Portwenn standards.
    The diseases are supplied by Dr Martin Scurr who acts as medical adviser. He was enlisted right at the beginning by scriptwriter Dominic Minghella (brother of the late Anthony) who asked him to suggest some rare diseases to show off Doc Martin’s skill as a diagnostician, and he came up with the man who grew breasts in the very first episode. Scurr takes his job very seriously and rides down to Port Isaac on his motorbike any time Doc Martin has to undertake a new procedure. ‘First time I defribbed,’ Clunes recalls, ‘first time I delivered a baby, he was there.’ Scurr gets furious when screen medics do things wrong – examining a patient from the left-hand side of the bed instead of the right, or ‘that terrible ear examination in We