'Diagnosis Murder' - A Family Affair Quiz

Answer: Community General Hospital

We often see the entrance to the hospital, with its name writ large. One shouldn't ask exactly what community it serves, because the first episodes were set in Colorado, before an unexplained move to be somewhere in Los Angeles. After the move, there are regular references to a journey of about 45 minutes from the hospital to the beachfront house shared by Mark Sloan and his son, and fires in Malibu Canyon feature in several episodes.

Answer: Internal medicine

While he is often referred to as Head of Internal Medicine, we regularly see him involved in all aspects of the hospital's operations - his previous experience in the army during the Korean War obviously gave him a large range of skills. He did once study for cardiac surgery, but abandoned that when his mentor in the field disappeared and was thought to have embezzled a significant sum of money. (It's all right, his murderer was uncovered many years later, while the hospital was doing some renovations.) Dr Sloan's love of performing magic tricks featured more prominently in early episodes, as did his penchant for roller blading around the hospital, and his love of jazz and tap dancing regularly gave Dick Van Dyke a chance to indulge himself in a bit of song and dance.

Answer: Steve

Mark's father James (played by Lewis Smith) made an appearance, as did his brother Stacey (played by Dick's brother Jerry) and his sister Dora (Betty White), but it is his son Steve, played by Dick's son Barry, who features in every episode. He is a detective for the LAPD, and regularly calls on his father to assist as a consultant on this cases.

He is very active, and also very single. It becomes a running joke in the show that whenever he became involved with a character, she was going to be either killed or killer.

Answer: Amanda

Dr Amanda Bentley is a pathologist and medical examiner. (Like Dr Sloan, she seems to have a rather flexible job description, as suits the storyline.) Because she was adopted as a child, she has a passionate interest in children who need care - this led her to adopting Deon, and giving her biological son CJ a brother of roughly the same age. Details as to how her marriage to Colin, CJ's father, ended are contradictory - it may have been his death in military service, it may have been a divorce caused by the stress of two conflicting careers meaning lengthy separations.

Answer: Scott Baio

Jack was only part of the hospital family, not the real-life family. He and Amanda regularly assisted Mark in his cases. Community General was clearly not a hospital that kept track of anybody's working hours - while reference is frequently made to shifts, they always seem to have just ended at exactly the right time.

When Scott Baio decided to leave the show, his character moved to Colorado, and it was later revealed that this was because Jack had fallen in love with Amanda, and didn't want to ruin their friendship. Jack's family connections with gangsters sometimes proved to be useful to the sleuths.

Answer: Norman Briggs

Russell Haviland (James Cromwell) was the murder victim in the 'Jake and the Fatman' episode that introduced Dr Sloan and what was then called Clairemont Hospital, 'It Never Entered My Mind'. Delores Mitchell (Delores Hall) was Dr Sloan's secretary for the first two seasons of the show. Madison Wesley (Joanna Cassidy) is seen several times in the seventh season as Dean of the Medical School.

Norman Briggs (Michael Tucci) was the Administrator for four seasons, constantly irritating everyone with his accountant's insistence on detail, records, careful management of money, and so on. But he was always acting in the best interests of the hospital for whose success he cared passionately, and recognition of this helped the others respect him even as they tried to avoid him. He felt that the time spent detecting was detracting from their care for patients, and he may have had a point!

Answer: Jesse

Jesse Travis, played by Charlie Schlatter, replaced Dr Jack Stewart as the keen young male member of the hospital detective team. He is a resident, whose chosen area of specialty changes on a regular basis - they're all so appealing! At the start of the sixth season, he goes into partnership with Steve (with Mark as a silent partner) in running a barbecue restaurant near the hospital. Hospital staff, who get a discount, are regular clients.

It does not do to inquire too closely how a resident and a homicide detective find the time to run their own restaurant, but we see them there and sorting out whose turn it is to be there on a regular basis.

Answer: Frontier Dad

'Frontier Dad' was one of the later episodes written by Barry Van Dyke, all of which included his four children Carey, Shane, Wes and Taryn. 'Sleeping Murder' was the episode that featured Jerry Van Dyke as Mark's brother Stacey; 'Inheritance of Death' was a first season episode in which Dick Van Dyke played the murdered millionaire Jonathan Nash, as well as his two sons and his daughter; 'Murder in the Family' saw Stacy Van Dyke (Dick's daughter) playing Mark's estranged daughter Carol. I told you this show was a family affair!

Answer: Shane

'Frontier Dad' was only one of the fourteen episodes in which Shane Van Dyke portrayed Alex Smith. The character had previously appeared in several episodes, including 'Gangland', in which a notorious criminal who looks exactly like Mark Sloan (guess who plays the role) is brought into the hospital with a gunshot wound. Shane Van Dyke also appeared as other characters in three earlier episodes, including the juvenile delinquent Tommy in 'Never Say Die', another episode written by his father and featuring all four of his siblings.

Answer: Andy Griffith

Andy Griffith reprised his role as Ben Matlock (from the 1986-1995 CBS series of that name) when Mark asked his old friend to help defend Jesse, who had been accused of murder. In a sense, this brought the show back to its very roots: 'Diagnosis: Murder' was a spinoff form 'Jake and the Fatman', which itself originated in a 1986 episode of 'Matlock'.

The episode is only one of many in which 'Diagnosis: Murder' used guest stars as either themselves or the character they had played in another series. Perhaps the quintessence of this came in the Season Five episode 'Discards': Robert Culp, who played tennis pro/spy Kelly Robinson in 'I Spy' is Dane Travis, Jesse's long-absent father whose absence turns out to be because he was a spy, not an accountant. The complex problem of clearing him from murder charges involves a number of other former secret agents, including Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain) from 'Mission Impossible', John Garrison (played by Patrick Macnee, who portrayed John Steed in 'The Avengers'), Alexander Drake (played by Robert Vaughn, previously Napoleon Solo on 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E.') and Jim Kesler (the son of a former colleague of Dane Travis, played by Phil Morris, son of Greg Morris who was on the 'Mission Impossible' team).