I’ve never liked medical television. Not even ER. I just don’t get it. Why would you want to watch what happens in a hospital? Faff on all you like about brooding doctors with hooded eyes and the way they improbably live on boats and whatnot, but you are still, essentially, getting your kicks out of other people’s misfortune.

Fictional people, true enough, but fictional people sound the same when a whining buzzsaw is being used to chop off the top of their head. They seem to have just as many wibbly bits that can shoot out and spatter a surgical gown, or spongy brainy bits that can just go plop on to the floor. Maybe I’m just squeamish. Maybe other people feel the same about crime dramas, or war. Whatever. I have always considered medical telly to be the on-screen version of that grim kid at your school, who tried to make people squeal by turning his eyelids inside out. Freaks me out. Bleurgh.

And lucky me, because this week I get to review a pair of real-life hospital horrors. There was Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery (the brain episode, enticingly enough) and SuperDoctors, in which Robert Winston looks at pioneering medical stuff, and, this week, checks out robots. Which do surgery. Often on the brain. Dream job, this TV reviewing lark. Oh yes.

He’s a strange sort of chap, is Professor Winston.

Indeed, “professor” doesn’t quite seem honorific enough. Wizard Winston, perhaps. Terry Pratchett’s Robert Winston. He’s all hair and moustache, like Oliver Letwin in disguise, and the whole effect is so disarmingly hobbitish and charming that it comes as quite a shock when you listen to him, and realise that he actually seems to be a bit of git.

“You’re a bit close to the liver, aren’t you?” he’ll bitch at some fellow surgeon, who is using a vast, state-of-the-art contraption to do something unspeakably red and sticky inside the body of a tiny, tiny child. His typical countenance seems to be one of surprise, that other surgeons do sometimes do OK, despite them all suffering from the glaring handicap of not being him. He has a go at using the machines himself, and he’s rubbish at it, and everything after comes across as a little like pique.

Oh look, maybe I’m being unfair. It’s not so easy to judge something when you spend most of an hour with your own hands held up in front of your face, to prevent you from actually seeing what is happening on screen. For the last half, in which a man has the top of his skull taken off, a tumour the size of a plum removed from his brain, and the gap plugged with, dear God, “fat harvested from his abdomen”, I was reviewing mainly by squelch. Frankly, if you enjoy watching this sort of thing, you are either a doctor yourself, or you are sick in the head. (Pun intended.)

Blood and Guts, after all that, is a sort of soothing balm. Fronted by the very excitable Michael Mosley, it concerns itself more with the development and theory of messing about with brains, rather than the actual squidgy cut and thrust. Although there is a bit of that, too, with one woman clamped on a bed, chatting merrily away to her surgeon while the top of her head is an open, ketchup mess.

Mainly, though, we get history, and oddity, too. There is the macabre obsession of the surgeon pioneer Harvey Cushing, whose legacy of more than 1,000 diced brains still resides, picked, in a cellar beneath Yale. There is the lobotomising monster Walter Freeman, and there is somebody else, whose name I forget, who stuck a deep brain implant into a bull, and then fought it, properly, with a remote control and a matador’s cape. This is how medical telly should be. Not too much gore. (Pun unintended. Although it is rather good.)

Mosley, who you might remember from The One Show or Medical Mavericks, is a real enthusiast, and a proper medical geek. “I’m going to undergo transcranial magnetic stimulation to interfere with my motor cortex!” he trills at one point, and he does, and it means he can’t touch his own nose, and he is thrilled. Then he goes on to show you how this, or something similar, can help people with Parkinson’s disease. By the end, you feel the world is increasingly wonderful, and increasingly advanced, and not just somewhere which feels increasingly distant if you happen to be Robert Winston.

SuperDoctors, Thur, BBC One, 9pm; Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery, Wed, BBC Four, 9pm. Caitlin Moran is away

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