IT’S BEEN a long time since a TV medical drama that doesn’t have at least one team of blood-spattered paramedics crashing through double plastic doors yelling incomprehensible jargon drifted on to our screens. Nip/Tuck doesn’t really qualify, and neither does Extreme Makeover, although it probably ought to; the BBC’s Silent Witness combines medicine and murder, but the crime is the star, not the science.

Five’s new US buy-in House differs from all of the above. Being Five, and having the word “house” in the title, it might easily have been mistaken for yet another home makeover show. Nothing of the sort. It’s one of the most enjoyable bits of television I’ve watched in a long while.

It stars Hugh Laurie as Dr Gregory House, a cantankerous, cynical medical genius with a pronounced limp and borderline Tourette’s. I thought I was going to have trouble buying the man who gave us such a convincingly hapless Bertie Wooster (not to mention an excellent Toad of Toad Hall) as a New Jersey medic with a mind like a steel trap, but buy him — and the whole premise — I did.

House is essentially a medical whodunnit, with Laurie as the moody, maverick cop and an assortment of bugs as the bad guys. In this first episode, a pretty, vibrant kindergarden teacher keels over in class. No one can figure out what’s wrong with her, but if they don’t find a cure she’ll die. Dr House and his team investigate and, by a process of elimination, figure out a solution.

House himself is, like the song says, a complicated man. He is also in many ways a familiar man, the evolutionary product of troubled TV medics over the years, ranging from Dr Jekyll to Frasier, men often more in need of a cure than their patients. Laurie, however, brings his own flourish to the character, even managing a passable American accent (at least to these English ears — who knows, in New Jersey he might sound as bogus as Dick Van Dyke).

Shortly after our kindergarden teacher is admitted to hospital, the camera sneaks into her room, an unwelcome and unexpected intruder. It slides up her body and into her nose, past tissue and bone until finally it arrives at the site of the disease. It invites us to see her not as a human being, but as a living organism, a collection of cells like any other — a philosophy that House, ever the sociopath, advocates as essential to good medical practice.

The CSI camera footage returns during subsequent medical explanations, a quirky and effective device. Elsewhere, Laurie hones his character’s roguish charm, impishly prescribing a tub of mints to a hypochondriacal patient, deducing that another’s wife is having an affair. As flawed geniuses go, this one’s not bad. And the girl? A tapeworm in the brain. Beats blood-spattered paramedics any day.

From fictional medical drama to real-life medical tragedy, Bollocks to Cancer on Channel 4 followed the fortunes of Steven Liddell, a 19-year-old chef with testicular cancer. Steven was not a lad naturally given to gloomy introspection, which was lucky given the ordeal — the removal of a testicle and three rounds of chemotherapy — that awaited him. “I’m 19; I don’t really do emotions,” he said, before shuffling off for a fag.

As it turned out, there was a lot more to Steven than laddish bravado. He had an easy wit which his awful predicament only encouraged. “The chemo could make me infertile,” he explained. “So my first challenge is to have a wank.” Later, as the nurse pumped toxins into his arm he joked, “I feel like Pete Doherty.” The direction mirrored his mood, with jaunty cartoons illustrating the medical facts, and liberal use of the word “bollocks”.

This then was a very personal journey, but also an education for all of us. Chemotherapy is the probable treatment for most cancers, and it’s not nice. Steven’s youth was, of course, his great advantage: psychologically, mortality is not really an option at 19. But it also made his predicament even more moving, especially since half-way through he — and we — found out that his 17-year-old girlfriend Katie was expecting their baby.

Steven now faced the prospect of having to find a place for them all to live. “What’s the point of having cancer if you can’t even get a council house,” he grumbled. Still, as he might have said himself, at least he didn’t need to worry about being infertile any more.

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