Cranford
Simon Woods plays Dr Frank Harrison
Dr Frank Harrison is the dashing young newly qualified physician whose arrival in Cranford causes a stir in more ways than one.
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"He's a very good doctor," says Simon Woods of his character, "but he doesn't read people well and gets himself into all sorts of terrible scrapes by not understanding what they are really thinking and saying.
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"He has a good bedside manner, but he'll take a woman's pulse or listen to her heart with a stethoscope and be so attentive and polite and gracious that they'll think he's practically proposing to them.
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"Essentially, Cranford society is dominated by these very independent, proto-feminist Amazonians that Gaskell has created, and Dr Harrison doesn't really know how to cope with them.
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"It's a strange town where most of the men are ineffectual and uninspiring, slightly hopeless even, and poor Dr Harrison, just arrived from London, is like a bit of meat in a piranha tank!"
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Simon, who credits include Mr Bingley in the acclaimed 2005 film version of Pride And Prejudice, believes Dr Harrison is actually negotiating a difficult path in a fast-changing world.
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"In this period, a doctor was neither one thing nor another – not a respected academic professional nor a tradesperson, but something in-between," he explains.
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"There's an ambiguity of status, a tension between 'trade', which was totally denigrated at that time, and the knowledge and expertise that medics were acquiring as modern medicine developed.
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"Then there's the issue of going into a woman's bedroom, and that's a difficult thing for a man in this period, something that only doctors (outside of a woman's immediate family) were allowed to do.
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"So Dr Harrison is in this strange position where he's a kind of tradesperson but also a newly skilled professional dealing with that level of intimacy. He's treading a precarious course."
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The same could be said of his relationship with Sophy Hutton, the strong-willed vicar's daughter whom he falls for, but whose love for him he later inadvertently alienates, thanks in part to his social naivety.
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"Things go well for Dr Harrison initially, and then everything starts to go wrong," says Simon, seen earlier this year as Octavian in the second series of 91Èȱ¬ Two's epic drama Rome.
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"He doesn't know when he's getting things wrong, and that's the key thing about playing him – he normally thinks things are going really well, he thinks he's getting on with everybody, and he's just oblivious.
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"After he loses his heart to Sophy, he doesn't give a thought to any other woman because he's found his girl, but his lack of understanding (in social situations) gets him into all sorts of trouble."
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Oxford-educated Simon first read the script for Cranford on his way home from making a film in Thailand.
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"I'd only planned to read enough pages to be able to go into a meeting, but I ended up reading it from start to finish because it came off the page like a novel. I thought it was brilliant.
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"And when I was told who the rest of the cast were, it became a job I couldn't not want to do. It wasn't frightening because everyone else was nervous too, and we became a very supportive group."
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