House call

JUST as Dr House is addicted to painkillers, I'm addicted to House and unable to stop getting regular fixes.

I can't remember when this addiction started. I tried to say no. And did say no regularly during the first and second series. Five haven't helped by screening additional doses of old episodes during the day to feed my habit.

Quite why House is so addictive is as big a mystery, as the patient with the undiagnosable disease who checks in each week in what's become one of US TV's highest-rated series.

The formula is always the same - a patient with mystery illness arrives, House is rude to the patients and relatives when not being rude to his team of doctors whose suggestions are shot down until, in the last five minutes, House suddenly realises what's causing the patient's ailment.

House really shouldn't be such compulsive viewing because it is so predictable. Then again, that's a very good reason to like it. This current series has the benefit of a running story in which a vindictive detective is out to punish House for taking too many painkillers to ease the discomfort of his bad leg.

He took exception to Dr House's bedside manner which left him with a thermometer sticking out of his bottom. He couldn't see the funny side of this backside joke.

House has three days to accept a deal that will put him in rehab but keep him out of jail. To force him to accept, administrator Cuddy and the House doctors are refusing to feed his drug habit. This makes him even more bad-tempered than normal, which is unfortunate for his dwarf patient and her dwarf mother.

After the mother gets upset over House's sizeist remarks, he tells her she's "got a bit of a short fuse" and informs her 15-year-old daughter that "you don't look a day over four feet".

"Are you high?," the mother asks when House behaves oddly.

"Higher than you," he replies.

House takes hostages - give him pills and he'll diagnose what's wrong with the patient. His drug habit becomes a matter of life and death.

Who'd have thought when Hugh Laurie was playing at being a silly ass with Stephen Fry in Jeeves And Wooster that one day he'd been an award-winning (and deservedly so) US TV star? Or that Fry would be the star of a gentle Sunday night series, Kingdom, that's also doing rather well in the ratings.

Mao's Bloody Revolution: Revealed is billed as the first full account of his life on TV. It's very full indeed. Full to the extent of going on for the best part of two hours. That's a lot of bloody revolution. It has the advantage of not only plenty of archive film but a succession of relatives and eyewitnesses to the cultural revolution in general and Mao in particular.

He was the son of a rich peasant who grew up when, as a film clips shows, street entertainment involved a man putting a live snake up his nose, inserting in one nostril and pulling it out the other. It's a clever trick, but not one I'd recommend to those who fear snakes or have small noses.

There's film - hidden for almost 70 years - of the young actress half his age that he took up with at the age of 45. In public, he founded the Communist state where the street entertainment was sentencing rallies, with wives denouncing husbands and sons denouncing parents. Rumours that Simon Cowell was chairman of the judging panel are greatly exaggerated.

Mao has a novel way of punishing rightist intellectuals, sending half a million to work as peasants. He was good at spin too. At 72, he announced he was still alive and kicking by jumping into the Yangtse river and floating around for the world's press for a couple of hours. In this country, of course, he'd have done a comedy sketch with Catherine Tate.