Nicely sick humour

THIS NEW CHANNEL 4 COMEDY is a pharmaceutical delight. The doctors appear to have sucked the mercury out of their thermometers, so crazy are their antics. The audience, meanwhile, is left with the impression that we’ve just ingested a prescription of amphetamines as scenes are played in fast-forward mode.

Still, what else could you expect from the production team behind Smack The Pony - a reheated bed pan of Only When I Laugh? This is Only When I Laugh at Joanna, the evil administrator who orders staff to kick each other and fellates the spikes on her high-heel boots. And at Martin, a registrar who looks up his former school mates on Friends Reunited: "Yes, Sally Dawson works at Asda. She wouldn’t kiss me at school and now she works at Asda. This is poetic justice."

Green Wing does take some getting used to if you’re not big on in-your-face humour. It stands there tweaking your cheeks and tugging at your nose until you giggle. But the running gags work, and the talents of the cast - Smack the Pony veteran Sarah Alexander among them - help.

One of the strangest, and funniest, performances is by Michelle Gomez, who played Janice in another Channel 4 sitcom, The Book Group. Here she is the hospital’s staff liaison officer, who ensures, among other things, that staff get their jelly. In fact, the show seems like what would result if a group of nine-year-olds on a sugar high nicked a laundry bag of white coats and went off to play doctors and nurses.

The question is, how does it shape up against Scrubs, the America hospital sitcom that recently enjoyed this Friday night slot? Well, I’d rather be in the company of our Yankee cousins, but while their white coats are away being disinfected, Green Wing makes for an entertaining locum.

CHECK OUT ... DOC MARTIN Thursday, ITV, 9pm

REPLACE Martin Clunes’s white coat with a white collar, swap rural Cornwall for rural Ireland, and ITV’s latest comedy drama is a twist on BBC’s long-running Sunday night drama Ballykissangel.

Taking on the truculent love interest role filled in Ballykissangel by barmaid Assumpta is Caroline Catz as Louisa Glasson, the village schoolteacher and the only one to disapprove of the appointment of Dr Martin Ellingham (Clunes) as the new GP. Wonder if he and Louisa might somehow, just, fall in love?

Doc Martin is, we learn, an arrogant surgeon who has been forced to retrain after he develops a bizarre, and rather unfortunate, phobia about blood.

CLASSIC TV ON DVD … CSI: MIAMI: SEASON 1, PART 1, Momentum Pictures, 39.99

AS Horatio Caine, David Caruso, formerly of NYPD Blue, is too mannered an actor for me. He stands with his hands on his hips too often, he puts on his shades like he’s putting the final full stop at the end of each scene and there’s the way he says: "Hmm, interesting, my friend."

Yet CSI: Miami, the first spin-off from the original, Las Vegas-set CSI (CSI: New York has recently joined the family) remains a cop show of a consistently high standard and, almost 20 years on from Miami Vice, it’s nice to be back down south.

This DVD set, released next week, contains the first 12 episodes of the show’s debut season.

‘Do people keep clichs for times like these?’ Josh Lyman is told to keep his chin up in The West Wing, (Tuesday, E4)

‘It looked like a beautiful woman with her teeth knocked out’ Alan Whicker recalls Florence in Whicker’s War, (Monday, Channel 4)

SEE AT ALL COSTS: Hamburg Cell (Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm) - The controversial dramatised story of the 9/11 hijackers.

MISS AT ALL COSTS: Bognor or Bust (Thursday, ITV, 10pm) - Angus Deayton escapes Hell, or at least its kitchen, to curse us with a new game show.