A chat with Martin Clunes, star of ‘Doc Martin’

Excerpt:

Martin Clunes is the star and co-steward of “Doc Martin,” a popular and personally beloved British import (from the commercial network ITV) about a big-city doctor whose life becomes enmeshed, to his ongoing discomfort, with the people of Portwenn, a Cornish fishing village. (He retreats there when a suddenly acquired fear of blood interrupts his surgical career.) The show’s seventh season is now streaming domestically via Acorn TV and will come to American public television early next year — KCET will carry it locally, beginning Jan. 14.

It is a comedy of extreme frustration, in which Clunes’ Dr. Ellingham, highly competent at his job and self-defeating in life, nevertheless manages to fall in love, with Caroline Catz’s schoolteacher Louisa, have a child and marry, in that order. (There are many other characters, each frustrated and frustrating in his or her own way.) This has happened at a glacial pace and with many excruciating detours — a pace slowed further by the fact that, though the events of one season lead more or less straight into the events of the next, the show now appears only every other year. Martin and Louisa’s son, James, born in a 2011 episode, is still a baby.

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