Feeling ill? Take our cultural cure

I have just returned from that hospice of fun, the hospital, with a new knee - and this time I went in well-prepared with DVDs. I ascertained beforehand that my private ward could play them, but I can't guarantee this necessary facility is available in every NHS hospital so you may have to bring your own DVD player, and possibly a personal headset.

Since I'd come out of the general anaesthetic hallucinating I deemed it advisable to continue the experience for a while, to lessen the shock of reality. What better way to soften the rude transition than with a good dose of Disney's Melody Time (1948) - a cheerful animated compendium including Once Upon a Wintertime, an art deco symphonic poem of softly swirling snow, and Little Toot, in which a naughty tugboat is over his head in surreal waters ...

Why not ease oneself into daytime with the easygoing Groundhog Day (1993)? Groundhog Day is a peculiarly American festival, in which legend has it that if a groundhog (a cross between a giant squirrel and a skunk) catches sight of its own shadow on February 2, then six weeks of winter will follow - and they always do and it always does.

The film stars Bill Murray (pictured above, with Andie MacDowell) as a cynical TV newscaster reluctantly covering the annual event for the third year in a row. Imagine his horror when he finds himself trapped in a time warp, seemingly doomed to suffer through February 2 for the rest of eternity. And isn't every day a Groundhog Day in hospital?

The nurse bursts brightly into the ward at precisely 6.14am. “Miserable,” she sings, meaning either me or the weather. She performs a series of operations under the general category of “bustling”: bright lights blast, thermometer sticks in mouth, blood pressure registers, keys rattle at the drug drawer. “You're not drinking enough,” she admonishes.

Endless repetition: doctor's rounds, medical rounds, blood tests, temperatures, pulses, bedpans, pills in a paper cup, muesli, rice pudding and ever more pots of tea. How does one cope? Well, by taking a leaf out of Bill Murray's book: it's simply a question of attitude. Watch this film for inspiration.

But time marches on. The light flashes on and I am rudely awakened. I look at the clock: 6.14am. I knew it would be. But am I really awake or just watching Evan Almighty (2007) again? For 6.14am is the time Congressman Evan Baxter's (Steve Carell) alarm goes off every day to remind him of his reluctant commitment to a jovial Almighty (Morgan Freeman) and Genesis 6:14 - “Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.” This comic retelling of a modern-day Noah is well worth it just to watch the reactions of congressional officials and lobbyists when Baxter shows up in the White House in a burlap robe, beard and sandals straight out of, well, Genesis.

Then it's time for a little peace and quiet - Powell and Pressburger in the shape of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), starring David Niven. I suppose it's the D-word that sends the nurses away: it's just not in the nursing manual of useful words and phrases, even though death is somewhat treated as a white comedy in the film. Plenty of white marble, white curly beards and white fluffy angel wings, and the heavenly host dressed in a variety of uniforms. And how do you get there, apart from having to die? Well, according to the film's production designer, Alfred Junge, it's up a very broad escalator stretching to Infinity and beyond. Plenty of food for thought.

Hardly my idea of heaven, though. I prefer Cocteau's Orphée (1950), based on the myth of Orpheus seeking his beloved Eurydice in the Underworld, where one gets to Heaven by stepping in and out of mirrors, or running the film backwards. But I don't want a rewind, and I can't bear to look at myself in the bathroom mirror as the morning dip is a slapdash affair at most, now that nurses are officially discouraged from touching the flesh of patients, even when encased in plastic mitts.

Even so, nurses by nature or sheer willpower are a cheerful band and seem to enjoy combining business with pleasure, managing whenever they can to combine dutiful visits with a look-in on my daily matinées. A particular favourite with the ladies comes 135 minutes into Ang Lee's espionage film about a beautiful, naive resistance worker in Japanese-occupied China in 1940, Lust, Caution (2007), when the lucky Mr Yee enjoys the sacrificial lamb served up every which way on the sexual menu. Always a crowd-pleaser.

But sometimes I fancy a moment or two of meditation. Baraka (1992), an ancient Sufi word for “blessing”, directed by Ron Fricke, takes me on an emotional and wordless tour of sacred and profane sights in 26 countries, drawing visual parallels between the natural and technological to a hypnotic ambient soundtrack by Michael Stearns and Dead Can Dance. And should you suffer a relapse, then a sequel, Samsara, is expected later in the year.

But now I must spare a thought for the shiftworkers who through no fault of their own miss my matinées. With Lars von Trier's hilarious and macabre The Kingdom (1996), no one is left out. And why? Because it's five hours long (ten if you count Part II). The plot involves a Danish hospital built on tainted ground, where the ghosts mingle with bewildered patients and eccentric doctors, one of whom is so enthusiastic about his work that he performs a liver transplant on himself. The late, brilliant Ernst-Hugo Järegård is Helmer, who hates his lunatic Danish colleagues with all the passion in his perfectionist Swedish being, finally resorting to voodoo to trip them up.

My wife enters. She's got a DVD. Oh, no, it's Carry On Nurse (1959). “How could you?” I howl.

“It's for the nurses,” she says, peeling me a grape. “They want to see the daffodil thermometer up the rectum scene again.”

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