Stamp collecting is all about assembling small pieces of paper with illustrations on them, taking them away from the original context they were used in and displaying them in special books. Face it, stamps are pretty much the same the world over, give or take a triangular one from this country, a picture of a cosmonaut on that one, and so forth. I find it easy to be dismissive of stamp collecting, but in truth the tv schedules offer programmes just as formulaic — and I speak as a fan.

Right now, I’m watching Masterchef. Once again, a group of hopefuls assemble to impress the hosts. The first challenge is to create a dish from the ingredients provided. While they do so, they’re interviewed about their hopes and passions, to enable the audience to build up a relationship with the contenders. The judges agree on a couple of cooks as being clear winners, a couple more as being hopeless, and quibble over who of the remaining two will go through to the next round of three contestants.

Thrust into a professional kitchen during lunchtime service, the three are put through an ordeal there before having to come back to the studio and cook the presenters a kickass meal of their own devising. And the very best of those contestants gets to progress further. It’s like this every episode until we get through to play-offs, and a victor is declared. Simple as that: yet millions of people tune in to see amateur chefs juggle different combinations of meat, fish, and veg to win over the show’s hosts.

Weird, that I complained in my last piece about the familiarity of Crazy Heart, and am now celebrating just the same when it appears on the small screen. I know already that when Masterchef finishes I’ll switch to see Gordon Ramsey belittling American restauraunteurs in the process of helping them reinvent their offerings to the public. And I can tell you now how the show will go. Gordon will turn up, order food that he barely touches. He will use his reputation to ensure the restaurant is full for an evening service which will fall apart due to the higher numbers and bring tensions to a head among the team. And after threatening to walk out on the biggest bunch of clowns he has set sight on, Gordon will get to the root of the personal issues involved in the eaterie’s failure, and resolve them in time for the restaurant to get a makeover of its interior and its menu, which will be served triumphantly to a full house.

Thing being, humans like the familiar. Note that we have a seven day week, rather than an endless succession of new days. Those seven days are broken down into 24 hours, and those hours need to be filled with something. Which breaks down into paying for tv, and watching it.

The trick is to balance repetition with difference. Use the same structure to deliver different stories, however similar they are to ones we’ve already seen. You know The Bill will always get their man, and now the show runs after nine that maybe scenes and language will be spicier than before. The Doctor will continue to save Earth, whether he’s wearing David Tennant’s face or Tom Baker’s scarf. Scooby Doo and the gang will forever investigate supernatural mysteries, only to find out that the source of the scare is a greedy landowner or possessive janitor. And so on.

Better than that, having watched these adventures once, we go back and re-experience them — sometimes in the company of hundred of others, in the case of Star Trek conventions. And can even buy them on DVD to ensure we can always get that same hit of House whenever we want. The more I think of it, the less sense this need for repetition makes. But then I look at my Amazon wishlist, and see the number of box sets for shows I’m already familiar with, and start to relive the moment when I first caught Robbie Coltrane as Cracker, or reminisce about The Water Margin…

So, writer-director Stephen Poliakoff has had a hissy fit with the BBC over their insistence that he needs to deliver a script before any new project is given the go-ahead. Seems the £3.7 million spent on his recent feature Glorious 39 was not a shrewd investment, having recouped less than £285,000. Rather than adopting a contrite approach, Poliakoff seems to have a serious case of entitlement, perhaps symptomatic of his gilded roots.

That said, I am not unsympathetic to Poliakoff’s situation, while — to put it mildly — not being a fan of the man’s work. Now, it’s wise to be wary of anyone suggesting that there was a golden age of any sort in any domain, but you don’t have to look too far back in the BBC’s history to discover that things were very different once. The era of Play for Today brought some startling drama to the screen, and writers such as Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter. The free rein they had (not the lack of g in rein: the term’s etymology is to do with slackening a rider’s hold on a horse, and is nothing to do with royalty) gave rise to the blossoming of some extraordinary talent.

But, at the same time, a lot of stuff the corporation produced was dreadful. For every Edge of Darkness there were several misfires like Triangle, a soap-on-a-boat travelling through sludgy waters under a slate sky. Doctor Who is rightly remembered for its classic episodes, but there were a lot of dismal ones in there too. And don’t get me started on It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot Mum. More control at the top doesn’t guarantee better drama — far from it — but it’s not a bad means of employing some kind of filtering. Which is what’s happening more and more. New writers are ushered in through the Writers Academy, and having been told the way the BBC likes things, are increasingly creating the scripts for long-established shows like Holby and Casualty.

You can like that or dislike it, but that’s the reality. And it has good and bad aspects. Also, comical ones. When I’d got through the door at Doctors and started submitting ideas, there was one I particularly liked that featured a ghost. My script editor liked the concept, but ran into a problem that she had to consult colleagues about: did ghosts exist within the world of Doctors? A small group of script editors and producers convened to discuss this issue, like a Church of England synod, wrestling with the issue of the afterlife in daytime medical drama. Never mind the fact that the ghost in the story was as bogus as those that featured in Scooby Doo, though was more sophisticated than a janitor with a rubber mask on to put those meddling kids off the trail. No, the spirit world of Letherbridge — the town where Doctors is set — had to be defined by committee.

That kind of stuff goes with the territory of working with institutions as big as the BBC. Poliakoff should consider himself exceptionally lucky that he’s been allowed to play with the toys there at all, and for as long as he has — but his ego and sense of entitlement are indicated by the fact that security personnel were called during his meeting with BBC drama commission controller Ben Stephenson.

If Poliakoff really is as all that as he supposes he is, then he should be able to discover his true worth on the free market. Find out who is willing to stump up the readies for him to bring one of his scripts to the screen, and how many people are then prepared to watch his new insights into the milieu of troubled toffs. How about doing a new project about a creative wunderkind who is cast out by those who nurtured him, and has to find his own way through a world of beastly financiers and cold commerce?

For a few minutes today, I wanted to cause someone serious pain. An arrangement that seemed locked down was turned over by someone who had no intention of honouring their initial commitment. Not that he told me directly: instead the news was relayed by a young woman working for him. She was blameless, he…I imagined holding him by the throat, squeezing until his eyes bulged. Only, I’m not cut out for that kind of thing, and it helps if you’re doing that sort of stuff to have dependable back-up.

Still, while it lasted, that vengeful fantasy was an enjoyable one. And that explains some of the appeal of Sons of Anarchy, which follows the ins and outs of a gang of outlaw bikers. Developed by Kurt Sutter, a writer very much associated with The Shield, one of my all time favourite shows, the series cranks his previous one’s fascination with machismo and violence up a further notch.

As with The Shield, there’s moral ambiguity here. Where the police drama featured bad cops, this biker show has good outlaws. Or at any rate confused ones. At the heart of it all is Jax Teller, a second generation biker unaware that the club’s current president is his real father. The man he called dad is dead, and Jax comes across the manuscript he wrote outlining his vision for their two-wheeler society. It’s a utopian sixties vision that’s a far cry from the club’s present day reality of gun running and drugs,and Jax has ideas about taking the gang into a future less reliant on crime.

That dream doesn’t go down brilliantly with the club boss, Sam Crow, or Jax’s mum, the Lady Macbeth of the scenario. All of which bodes well for plenty of two-fisted action and intrigue as the series develops. Matters are interestingly complicated by Jax’s ex wife, who is injecting drugs while she’s pregnant, and whose life Jax is still very much involved with. There’s also inter-gang politics to contend with, the Sons of Anarchy being ripped off a bunch of weapons they’d acquired for a black gang, who want delivery of same to protect their drug interests. That in turn leads the Sons to take on the Mayans, a Latino gang who they’ve kept their distance from up until now.

All of which makes for quite the powder keg of a pilot episode. It doesn’t have the visceral intensity or shock ending that The Shield’s opener had, or a character quite as memorable as Vic Mackey to hold your interest, but that’s fine: this is a different show with its own identity to develop. I’ll be following its progress with interest, if only because violence is best experienced vicariously rather than delivered to actual people, however much they merit it.

Off and on, I’ve been tempted to develpo a series based on a bike gang I met, Soldier Blue, whose members were all former military men. The gang seemed to fulfil a similar function in their lives as the army did, giving them structure and the company of similarly motivated comrades. But there’s something about America as a setting that works better for such characters, for much the same reason that a song called Route 66 feels ‘right’ while one titled A66 doesn’t.

Sons of Anarchy is interesting too for having bad guys as its focus. OK, maybe that’s a cliche of its own in this post-Sopranos world, but it’s rich territory to explore, and I can’t help feeling that there’s a richer British take to be had on it than Hustle, which is fun, but ultimately froth. It’ll be interesting to see what new series the BBC develops given plans to axe some currently scheduled shows. Fingers crossed, they’ll bring us something with the potential of Sons of Anarchy.

I have mixed feelings about Hustle. Thing being, I am fascinated by deception, the art of the con, and all that stuff lovingly documented by close-up conjuror Ricky Jay and celebrated in scripts by his buddy David Mamet. Which puts me firmly in the show’s catchment area, you’d think.

Only, in practice, Hustle is more often than not a disappointment. A half-baked piece of tame light entertainment, implicitly hampered by its protagonists being ‘nice’ con artists, who target nasty people and liberate their money to exact revenge on behalf of hapless third parties.

So, I am surprised and happy to report that the first episode of the sixth series was tremendous fun. The pace was zippy, the attitude jaunty, and the whole was a skilfully written and directed piece of pop entertainment of quality and distinction. In some ways, I was reminded of what people go on about, and on and on about, when they reminisce about shows like The Avengers (sixties incarnation): cheeky sexy fun that’s somehow essentially British.

The episode started gleefully with a fake Kylie Minogue tv shoot, set up to relieve a central casting Arab sheikh from £250,000. Only, this was a bogus Kylie who was really one of the gang that Michael Stone (aka ‘Mickey Bricks’, I kid you not) leads. Gleeful nonsense, in other words.

Their next victim is plucked from the headlines: a banker whose institution has been bailed out by the taxpayer and has pocketed a fat pension. A panto villain — his nickname was Piggy for godsake. Boo, hiss. And oh, what joy — however predictable — to see him stitched up by the crew…

What made things different this time round, and will continue to for this season, is that Mickey meets his near-match in a sexy Detective Chief Inspector determined to add his scalp to her impressive collection. Only, Mickey likes his scalp where it is, and has no intention of giving it up, even for a woman who — to use the show’s vernacular — is mostly posh with a bit of dirty thrown in.

Of course, the team turn up top. But it’s a close thing. And part of the skill is in the hands of writer and series originator Tony Jordan, who structures the episode so that you find out what happened for real in a flashback. Meaning maximum tension is extracted beforehand by showing Mickey together with the mark and the briefcase containing a cool half million the fat banker is going to hand over, and the police busting Mickey when he has the case in his red hand.

There were some suitably cool directorial flourishes, in the tradition of the show’s flash visual vocabulary. Split screen shenanigans used to good effect, play with time distortion, and general dynamism where colour and shadow were concerned. It all helped give the show a sheen that goes with its high-rolling subject matter, altogether appropriate since the benchmark for this kind of material is set by expensively styled films like the Ocean’s series.

Tony Jordan must have been cackling with some of the lines he came up with, referencing Anne Widdecombe’s arse and having the pseudo-Kylie’s Arabic patron tell her that her version of Locomotion was shit. I’ll leave you to check out the full picture over on iPlayer — thankfully it convinced, and amused as much as it convinced. Otherwise the whole would have fizzled out as surely as a Star Wars prequel, audience goodwill pissed up the wall by cynical opportunism.

So, kudos to Kudos — the production company responsible for the equally stylish and sophisticated Spooks for BBC1, and The Fixer, similarly distinctive over on ITV. Three audience-friendly returning series with intriguing high concepts. Nice one, guys.

I really was looking forward to a triumphant end to the Russell T. Davies years on Doctor Who. And the audacious conclusion of the previous episode, which saw the population of Earth replaced by doubles of The Master, was a creepy and bravura cliffhanger of truly cinematic dimensions to end on. Shame then, that tonight’s final episode, also David Tennant’s adieu from the series, turned out to be such a damp squib.

Really, I should be used to RTD pulling stunts like this. He is without doubt a brilliant showrunner, his imprint on every aspect of the resurrected series — often to breathtaking effect. The choice of Christopher Ecclestone as the first of the new Doctors. The triumphant opening story with Rose, demonstrating that the show could work for the whole family and not just a dog-eared fanbase. And perhaps most importantly, the choice of some truly excellent writers to work on the series — above all others, Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat.

Truth is, many of Russell’s own episodes were the weaker ones of the series. Recall the dreadful business with the London bus stranded on a desert planet offered up as an Easter special. But equally, he can sometimes deliver the goods — the Waters of Mars episode was a triumph, though how much of that was down to his co-writer? Well, I’d like to think Russell was responsible for the excellent stuff that led up to the Doctor’s demise, as the Timelord’s arrogance got the better of him for a while, until the suicide of a woman he’d saved from certain death in the face of his hubris made him realise he was out of control.

So, all that good work building things up, only for the final episode to be such a letdown. An anticlimax at least if you were expecting any sane resolution to the nasty goings-on with the return of the Gallifreyans, and the perfidy of the Master. Instead, the audience were fobbed off with vague handwaving that purported to deal with knotty plotty matters.

A real shame then…but RTD is a master at delivering emotional connections, and the latter chunk of the programme was essentially a greatest hits montage, as the Doctor and his writer revisit characters they have loved and bid them farewell before handing the reins of the show over to Steven Moffat. And, damn you Russell, it worked: my eyes were damp as we got to see Rose again, and I couldn’t help smiling as Captain Jack was slipped a piece of paper with the name of the guy sitting next to him in the nearest I’ve seen to the Star Wars cantina scene in the Dr Who universe.

A pity that Russell emphasises the heart of his story to such an extent that the brain expires from oxygen starvation: this is after all a science fiction show, and some attention to the intelligence that characterises the best of the genre would be welcome. But maybe that’s to come, along with new Doctor Matt Smith, when Mr Moffat takes over. Let’s hope so.

That blend of emotion and intellect can be achieved; Duncan Jones pulled it off in his triumphant debut Moon. And he’s one of the people I’d turn to in Steven Moffat’s situation of being given the keys to the BBC’s best asset. While we’re playing make believe let’s add some others to the list: comics writer Grant Morrison, science fiction novelist Alistair Reynolds, screenwriter Diablo Cody. Which gives you some indication of the problems faced by the people in charge of a series that attracts such attention. Whatever you make of Russell’s tenure on Dr Who, it’s attained a status it never previously had. Here’s to success in his future ventures.

There’s something cosy, complacent, about Christmas telly. And, truth be told, that’s an assessment that holds about A Child’s Christmases in Wales. It was a moderately entertaining tale about a family’s festive gatherings in the 1980s raised above the standard of a script that just about succeeded in living up to its lack of ambition by strong performances.

Writer Mark Watson should be grateful to the performers who breathed life into his fundamentally obvious and unchallenging script. Ruth Jones, playing the mother of the family, is used to this kind of work, doing a similar job of inflating material beyond its scope in Gavin & Stacey, which I find irksome and anodyne. Likewise with the other actors, all of whom did an excellent job.

An analogy can be made with The Travelling Wilburys — a group of legendary players collaborating on a frankly middle of the road offering. The cumulative effect is to ask ‘why bother?’, but in the same way that it’s sort of interesting to hear Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan on the same recording, there’s technical interest to be had in the results of a very particular challenge: how to fill an hour of screen time using the limited resources available on a BBC4 budget.

The answer? A story which is limited in space, but travels liberally through time. Three Christmases are depicted, using the same location and mostly the same actors, the exception being the two lads in the extended family, who as they grow through their teens are portrayed by different actors each Yule.

Frankly, it was a rather humble offering elevated beyond its roots. But, with the best part of a bottle of sherry inside you, and if you’re more partial to Gavin & Stacey than I am, maybe it’ll work for you. See for yourself.

Rather more successful was a repeat that I’d missed first time round last year. The Wainscoting was the first of three chillers scripted by Mark Gattis under the title Crooked House. Since the days of Dickens there’s been a tradition of spooky stories at Christmas, and that’s exactly what Gattis delivers. Traditional scares in (18th century) period dress, again realised by BBC4 on a low budget.

There’s a modern day framing device featuring a householder showing a spooky door-knocker to a local museum, and then we’re back in Ye Olden Days with a tale that’s simplicity itself. A well-to-do chap buys a house and is troubled by the interior decor. Specifically the wooden wainscoting on one wall…

First it’s a matter of unearthly noises. Then blood-like stains spread over the area. Even decorated over, the stains reappear to chilling effect. And the house owner discovers that the wainscoting was made of a gallows that has hung countless people.

Both Crooked House and A Child’s Christmases in Wales were conservative in scope, but Crooked House had an ambition and level of attainment that exceeded the smug cosiness of the comedy piece. It’s that vision which will drive me to seek out the other two parts of Gattis’s series, while I have no desire to re-experience the Mark Watson piece.

Does tv for Christmas have to be so safe? Given the need for family friendly viewing, the answer is a qualified yes. And at least these two programmes demonstrate that there’s a place for new work, rather than seasonal specials for tired favourites. Christmas might be a time for families to view together, but let’s hope this year’s crop of shows includes some that rise to the challenge of being entertaining and imaginative for all ages. Which is probably another way of saying that I hope Dr Who gets it right this year…

Glee is a very clever piece of work indeed. It manages to function as a comedy, a high school drama, a musical and more at the same time. More than that, it does so while fusing ironic humour with straight ahead song and dance routines. Quite a juggling act, and one that I hope will be sustained in the series proper when it debuts on E4 in the New Year.

The show’s DNA almost certainly owes something to the success of High School Musical, about which I know nothing but the success of which is glaringly obvious given I encounter no end of merchandise when I visit supermarkets and record stores. Mix that with a twist of Fame, and a dash of Mean Girls, and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect.

The story is pretty straightforward — what lifts it is the style with which the whole is accomplished. Seemingly every part is cast perfectly, character emerging within moments through whatever genetics has done to shape someone’s face and body, and costume that accentuates implicit character. Thus we encounter the disciplined media-savvy sports coach, the financially-driven principal, the sassy black siren and others. Fast edits ensure the whole moves with great pace, leading the viewer in pursuit of new nuggets of story.

A glee club is a high school musical society, and after the teacher leading the one at William McKinley High is suspended to become a drug dealer peddling the medical marijuana he’s prescribed for stress, a new teacher takes over. Will was part of the club back in his own McKinley days in the early 90s, and wants to enthuse the kids with the passion he felt for music and dance.

All very well, but wife Terri has very different plans for Will. She’s got a bigger passion for Balinese mahogany toilet brush holders than their slender joint income can cope with, and wants him to take a sensible grown-up job with one of the retailers she is obsessed with. And that’s the way it looks things will turn out initially, until a colleague reconnects Will with his passion for the glee club.

That’s Will’s story anyway. But to some extent that’s an excuse to get us to watch the antics of the teens. They’re initially dominated by Rachel, the singularly showbiz focused daughter of two gay men who won her first dance competition at the age of three months. She wants the glee club to succeed, and it looks like there’s no credible male partner to work with her — until Will blackmails Finn, one of the football team who’s also a fine singer, into joining the gang.

It’s quality stuff, with a sharp script that delivers humour along with interesting beats. And it moves fast, bang bang bang. Along the way, it also demonstrates a cavalier but intelligent way with writing devices: one scene is narrated by Will before Finn in turn takes up the monologue baton. Unusual and effective.

There’s something very American about the whole thing. American high schools really do have glee clubs, which have a Broadway pizzazz about them that was lacking in the productions I remember from my school days. I don’t recall Busby Berkeley dance routines and rearranged versions of Bee Gees songs in the version of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist we did at any rate.

The series was created by three men who were active in their own schools’ glee clubs: Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. They’ve been astute in devising something that hits so many buttons. The song and dance elements can’t help but echo the likes of X Factor and Pop Idol, and the songs are well chosen, mixing show tunes and cheesy rock ballads to good effect. The music industry approves: some artists are letting Glee use their songs at discount rates, and one episode will feature Madonna tunes throughout, Madge having let them access her back catalogue for nothing.

This isn’t a show for everyone, but its catchment is pretty wide. And you’ll have a good idea by now whether it’s a show for you. I thoroughly enjoyed the pilot, and will do my best to catch the series when it kicks off in January.

You’ve got to hand it to the people involved in Russian intelligence. Given the one we met in tonight’s Spooks I’m now convinced they spend their time playing in string quartets to relax, chewing over reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and doing crosswords in Mandarin. This, at any rate, was the impression given by Lucas, who’d spent four years being interrogated by Oleg, only to find that Oleg was now in London, and wanted to meet him at the White Cube — presumably wanting to check out the capital’s art scene while he got on with a spot of espionage.

All well so far, and the references to Trollope and Dickens further cemented Oleg’s cultural gravitas. But I got the sense Oleg knew his 19th century literature more than he knew Lucas. Mention was made to the fact that Oleg knew the inside of Lucas’s head inside out, but there seemed little evidence of this penetrating insight, or sense from Lucas of what it felt like to be confronted once again by his tormentor. Whether that was how David Farr wrote things, or a function of a script development process that emphasised moving the story forward at the expense of character insight, I obviously can’t say.

As torturers go, Oleg wasn’t a match for young David Platt on Coronation Street, but to be fair we weren’t seeing that side of his character. Instead, he’s in London to warn MI5 of a plot to…well, blow stuff up is what it amounts to. He reckons he’s got inside info — for a price. But will the Brits pay up?

Something failed to convince about this episode, and ditto the last Spooks I caught. Which is a shame. At its best, Spooks has brought intelligent drama about world issues to a mainstream audience that might otherwise shy away from issues of geopolitics. And it’s done so by combining that gravitas with characters you can root for and a good bit of whizzbang action. This time out — I’m not so sure. The whole business of Oleg and Lucas being in contact seemed unnecessarily protracted to take in a false start: I felt shortchanged of story, unusual for a series in which I’ve sometimes had to strain to keep up with the amount of story information.

Lucas, incidentally, sports the kind of Russian prison tattooes that have cropped up in the media a few times of late, for instance in Croneberg’s Eastern Promises, and in magazine supplements I’ve chanced on. Never mind the significance though — what really matters is that it’s eye candy, as is Lucas’s American lover, who is seen topless. Something to please everyone I guess, and another sign that Spooks is changing by getting all sexed up.

At least the series is looking for ways to stay topical. The previous episode featured a gang of anti-capitalist cyberterrorists, tapping into concerns about international banking and using the internet as a plot device in interesting ways: the public, or at any rate those not watching kittens tumble round spindryers on YouTube, got to vote on which of the assembled billionaires they had captured would be executed. Not a bad idea, come to think: it might give the likes of Jedward something to think about if the stakes of losing X Factor were more lasting than 15 minutes of fame.

True Blood had me from the opening scene, when a wolfen fellow with long hair dressed in black is found behind the counter of a shop. We assume he’s a vampire, and that he’s called something poncy like Lafayette…only he turns out to be posing as a member of the undead, the real vampire in the scene being the guy who looks like a redneck and threatens to kill the pseud.

Speaking as someone thoroughly tired of humourless dudes wearing long black leather coats and bike boots as they go to pick up milk and kitty litter from the local Tesco, that reversal was a longed-for relief. Not that True Blood is without its stereotypes, as we were introduced in quick order to a feisty black woman tired of serving and working for imbeciles. That would be Tara, good friend of Sookie, our barmaid heroine, whose defining characteristic is that she is psychic, able to hear the inner voices of those around her. All, that is, except Bill, the local vampire.

Yes, that’s Bill. Not Draco, Pierre, or Gunther. Bill. Short for William, and here applied to a smoulderingly handsome vampire who, like his peers, gets by through consuming the faux plasma referred to in the title of the series. That in turn accounts for the vampires coming ‘out of the coffin’ and entering the mainstream of American society.

This being America, there are bigger weirdos than vampires to contend with. The presence of the undead triggers all kinds of buttons, not least a subculture determined to have carnal knowledge of them. Which is fine with the vampires, who are themselves partial to sex with humans. Add a bit of blood letting to that, and the scene can get pretty intense and messy, and the pilot episode partly concerns a woman who turns a lover on by showing him a video of her making love with a vampire, the consequence being he gets so excited he ends up strangling her in the height of passion. Oh, and the man in question is Sookie’s brother, so you can be sure this is a story we’ll be coming back to.

All this is brought to you by Alan Ball, the man who scripted American Beauty and created and masterminded Six Feet Under. Two impressive achievements, and it looks like True Blood could be a more populist third.

Like those two other successes, this new series traffics in matters of sex and death — the biggies that underpin any drama. It lacks the subtlety of Six Feet Under, but nuance and fangs are unlikely bedfellows at the best of times. Instead, we get interesting characters and situations: Sookie rescues Bill from a sick couple who want to drain and sell his blood, there being a blackmarket in vampire juice since it supposedly functions as a kind of haemoglobin-enhanced Viagra.

It’s good fun stuff, seemingly devoid of the kind of metaplot that was responsible for the weaker aspects of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Well, so far at any rate. Given that the show is entering its third season in the States, I’m sure that in the process it’s gone into all kinds of interconnected detail that was thankfully absent tonight anyway.

Why the widespread interest in toothy bloodletters? Vampires are all over the media, almost as much as zombies. There’s something romantic about vamps though — the difference between gently nibbling a lover’s neck and levering their cranium open to get to the grey stuff — which in a classic case of reverse psychology only makes me more curious to write about the brain-eaters at the base of the undead food pyramid. And I do believe I’ve got a take that…but let’s leave that pitch for another day.

House is a show that I enjoy but don’t follow. And having caught an episode this evening, I can’t imagine me watching another one for a while. My feelings are shaped considerably by Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of the good doctor.

Apparently a key reason that a Brit ended up in the role was because they couldn’t find an American actor willing to make himself so unlikeable. See also the popularity of Simon Callow Stateside: the man speaks the truth, however unpalatable, and that’s something at a premium in a country which, more than the UK, showers its children with praise for their clumsy efforts at becoming performers, however painful the results for anyone watching.

Gregory House’s form of honesty is incisive diagnostic skill, delivered with a hefty side order of sarcasm. Which would normally make him someone to be hated, or at any rate admired only grudgingly. But the show’s creators were canny enough to give him a limp and a walking stick, which hints at tragedy in the shorthand of the small screen, and lo and behold Laurie’s character attains another dimension; two is about right for a lead in an American drama series.

Anyway, several seasons in, the show has found a comfortable formula with its patient who has something inexplicably wrong that worsens with every ad break until House cracks on with the solution, having done what he can to goad it out of his team of juniors. And this is what makes the show work: cranky genius is attractive. And we know he’s a genius because the medics assisting him use bigger words than we do to describe what’s up with the patient, which makes them smarter than us the audience, and hence House even smarter in turn.

To be fair, it can work very well. House’s thing is looking for systemic solutions, underlying principles which account for the whole array of symptoms that a patient is experiencing. And that has a certain Holmesian quality, attractive to watch as House groups together symptoms and explains why they do or don’t explain what the patient is experiencing. It’d be petrifying to go through as the patient, but for the armchair viewer it’s compelling stuff, as House joins the dots and saves the day.

Leavening this heady stuff is the interplay of personalities within House’s backing group. And tonight’s episode did something pretty smart. They’re dealing with a woman who feels that her life is best devoted to supporting those who are brilliant, having decided to accept that she is ‘average’ (please note: the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of Normality has yet to identify any human being who conforms to statistical norms). The parallels with the backing group’s relationship with House are obvious, and it made for a touching tale as, along with her illness, the patient lost her job supporting her particular highflyer and decided to change her aim in life.

The other business, also nicely conducted, was to do with getting House and someone he’s thought of as a friend to talk and for that friend to stay at the hospital rather than moving on. Only, that went into an interesting direction when the friend announced at the end of the episode that he considered his friendship with House over, if indeed it had ever existed. An interesting ‘ouch’ moment, House having opened up with the guy and showed some vulnerability in the process.

All of which goes to show that with a protagonist as individual as House, the writers have to reach that bit further to come up with a resolution that fits the lead and the tone of the series. No heartfelt exultations and hugs here: instead, the chill of a friendship that may never have been. An unusual climax, and one entirely appropriate to this singular show.