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Ian Hislop on House - Radio Times, April 2006 |
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It's always the same. The opening scene of House establishes a normal, happy situation
involving ordinary, likeable people. But this is House, and you know that very shortly - just before the opening credits, in fact - one of them is going to have a seizure and end up writhing on the floor.
Then, after the credits, Dr House and his team of good-looking specialists will have to solve the
obscure but unpleasant mystery illness before the patient dies. At some point there will be some really disgusting recreations of the inside of the heart or the liver, and then it will be time for the closing credits. I may have missed out a few commercial breaks, but that's more or less the pattern of every episode.
I'm completely hooked on House, which is odd because normally I don't like medical programmes. ER, Casualty, Grey's Anatomy have all passed me by. But give me Hugh Laurie with a beard, a gammy leg and an American accent and I can't turn it off.
The programme has a lot of obscure medical terminology (I now join in and diagnose "lupus" for most cases), but the real pleasure is not the amount of jargon but the amount of rudeness. Dr House is much ruder than anyone in an American hospital has ever been or would ever be allowed to be in real life. He is rude to his subordinates, to his superiors and to his patients. And in fact to anybody else who appears in the building.
We are now well into series two and there are signs that the producers are worried that this essential template for House is too rigid for a long-running series and have been trying to vary the pattern, with a love story for House with his ex-wife, and various subplots for the other characters.
I don't really mind, but I don't really care either. As long as we still have the bit where he decides that the patient has got something unpronounceably awful and is definitely going to die. He then pulls a face and says, "Boo hoo". Beautifully performed, politically incorrect, heartless, funny and peculiar. It makes me want to be an American doctor with a stick, and you can't say that about much television.
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Now take a look at our full House guide.
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