Docherty first performed at the 1980 Edinburgh Festival Fringe with the comedy sketch group The Bodgers which he formed with George Watson's College schoolfriends Moray Hunter, Gordon Kennedy and Pete Baikie.
With Morwenna Banks he co-wrote the C4 Comedy Lab "Model, Actress, Whatever..." directed by Rankin and, again with Moray Hunter, two series of the BBC2 sitcom The Creatives.
[6] Premiered in 1989 the show marked a shift away from the political satirical orthodoxy of the 1980s to the surreal, character based comedy of the 1990s.
The recurring characters he portrayed included MacGlashan, George MacDiarmid, Peter Wells, Mr Nice and one of the Stoneybridge councillors.
Also in 2000 he co-starred with Mark Williams in The Strangerers, the Rob Grant penned sci-fi series for Sky One, and provided one of the voices for the Aardman Oscar nominated short Humdrum.
The show also featured some of the first television work of writers Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, and writer/performers David Mitchell and Robert Webb.
In 2000 to 2001 he hosted the Radio 2 show Saturday Night Jack which reunited him with his Absolutely colleague Pete Baikie.