An Essay Upon Locke

(No, no, not that Locke...)

Around our house, 1971 became the "annus horribilis," the bad year against which all the other bad years were judged. The worst thing that happened was that my Dad's oldest brother, my Uncle Brandy, passed away that fall. My memories of the event are dark and smoky, and I remember rain, even though it might not have rained at all. Dad also had a week's hospital stay due to kidney stones, which sent Mom and I flying back and forth to Our Lady of Fatima Hospital for a week. Frisky, my budgie, died one Sunday morning from some type of seizure or stroke, two days after I was graduated from junior high school.

To add to all these jolly events, Dad's car was stolen five minutes after he parked it in front of the Garden City [bowling] Lanes and the refrigerator died (with a full freezer) within two weeks of each other. (As far as I was concerned, the new aluminum sidings were a failure as well; I thought the house looked classy in its dark grey paint job with white trim, and the sidings chosen were a paler shade of that everlasting 1970s harvest gold.) Not to mention I started high school that fall, which meant a half-hour walk to school in all weathers and another half-hour back, starting at 6:30 a.m., since school began at seven.

In searching for good things about 1971, I discover only four: I got a bicycle. Finally. It only took me fifteen years. (Short version: Dad was afraid I'd get run over, so I never got a bike until my teens when I cunningly enlisted my physician's help.) The Homecoming: A Christmas Story was first broadcast in December of 1971, my favorite Christmas movie of all time along with The House Without a Christmas Tree. My best friend Sherrye and I first saw what is one of my favorite films ever, The Andromeda Strain, on Memorial Day weekend of 1971.

And then there was Doctor Simon Locke.

Locke entered television history as a series where what went on offscreen was often more interesting than its onscreen presence. The original idea of the show was to have a young, hotshot doctor accept a position in a small farming community as associate to an elderly doctor who's realizes his vast practice is getting difficult to cope with. The younger physician is tired of overcrowded city hospitals and having to sweet talk administrators and put up with malingerers and wishes to "just practice medicine." His steamroller style immediately clashes with the older doctor's more gentle approach.

At least that was the concept when Jack Albertson accepted the role of Dr. Sellers. Done properly with a seasoned actor such as Albertson and the talents of Sam Groom, who played the original adult Russ Matthews on the daytime serial Another World as our young hotshot, Locke could have been an interesting, if still minor, bit of drama. However, by the time the series went into production, the producers had changed the concept slightly. It's very possible the sponsors felt that the conflict between the doctors made Locke unlikable and Sellers look grumpy. So for the remainder of the series Drs. Sellers and Locke chiefly cooperated with each other with occasional flareups; Locke's antagonist became the cynical local sheriff, Dan Palmer (played by native Montrealer Len Birman), who pooh-poohed Locke's giving up a good city salary and thought his nice-guy attitude was too good to be true.

The series producers' parsimony was just that proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" for Jack Albertson. The cast was forbidden to watch the "dailies" of each day's production, Albertson, the consummate professional, saw bad takes, visible boom mikes, erratic sound, dropped cues and other gaffes when the episodes aired and he was horrified. To add insult to injury, both he and Groom found themselves changing clothes behind trees, bushes, barns, and other outdoor venues and behind studio flats because the producers wouldn't spring for a dressing room. The series filmed in Canada mostly during the winter and Albertson, Groom, and the other actors frankly froze their backsides off. Finally Albertson was angry enough to demand out of his contract. When the producers of the series told him they'd take him to court, he countered, "No jury would convict me." So off went Albertson and a new situation was devised: Simon Locke became a Police Surgeon working in the big city. (Bizarrely, Len Birman was also transferred to the new series as well, playing Lieutenant Dan Palmer.)

For my own part, I liked the "country doctor" theme the best and quit watching Police Surgeon sometime in its first year (after Len Birman left the cast). I found it depressing: viewed today it so typifies the urban decay of the 1970s, with the drug pushers and the desperate addicts, the crumbling city infrastructure, the protection rackets leaning on the small business owner, idealistic police officers battered from all sides by their social conscience and their fears along with their opposite number, the cops "on the take," small-time mobsters...time machine time, and not in a good way. I saw echoes of the slow death of downtown Providence, the tawdry downfall of Times Square in New York City, the endless news stories about the "Combat Zone" in Boston.

Besides, I was a Jack Albertson fan, and Albertson in a mediocre show was better than no Albertson in a somewhat better one. Even today the series has a uniqueness all its own. Medical shows, cop shows, and lawyer shows dominated the 1970s, and all the previous medical television dramas—Medical Center, Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, Medic, the doctors segment of The Bold Ones—had big-city settings; even Marcus Welby was stuck in the suburbs close to big city help. Locke was the first show to tackle a country practice, and in hindsight it resembles a James Herriot saga with people instead of animals: a country practice with long distances to drive, house calls, inclement weather, traditional beliefs clashing with new ideas, lack of modern equipment, any hospital miles away. I almost wouldn't be surprised to see earnest Locke shaking his head over a version of Tristan Farnon knocking off a pint at the local Dixon Mills watering hole. Plus, as in the first two Addie Mills specials, the location work made Dixon Mills seem more authentic. Small-town America in this series doesn't have "the Little House effect," in which you can tell everything was filmed in southern California, or the later nondescript city landscapes that all looked alike because it was all filmed in Vancouver (i.e. The X-Files).

I recalled just how much I loved this series just recently when RetroTV began showing it under the umbrella title of Police Surgeon. Memories came rushing back after a couple of episodes: the plaintive sing-song bit of music played when an episode ended on a melancholy note; the "sting" motif during a crisis, and Len Birman's distinctive "Dan scowl" when Simon pissed him off (since Dan didn't like Simon anyway, this was about every episode). Half-remembered plots came back as well as favorite scenes: Simon Locke's earnest but sometimes blunt manner that didn't endear him immediately to the citizens of Dixon Mills used to Andrew Sellers' gentle bedside manner; Simon's and Dan Palmer's eternal squabbles, like two stallions facing off for dominance; Simon's jury-rigged gadgets made necessary by the remote locale; Louise Wynn's sensitive yet brisk handling of patients and her exasperation with the testosterone-fueled conflicts between Locke and Palmer. Seeing it again was like a sweet, sweet dream come true, and I only hope it remains on long enough so that I can figure out how to record it when it comes around again.

(Now if they can only find the missing episode "Marooned"...)