The second is the reminder that Nye is a very funny writer indeed – one of the few in this country that understands the importance of tiny observations in the way that – say – the writers of Frasier do And thirdly, the acting is wonderful. Possibly because it is all done on location without an audience, it is naturalistic and understated None of that awful shouting and pausing. Dylan Moran (who reminds me a bit of his fellow stand-up, Alan Davies), as the Irish chap with a slight social drinking problem who marries into a sniffy country family, is irresistible. The doctor did not agree, and a filmed case conference (which hinted at a troubled family history, involving foster-parents) was also sceptical. The impression was left that this lady was some kind of hysteric.Everything will have been done by the book. She will have given written permission for the producer to use her case, and may even have seen some of the early versions of the film. But even so, should she have taken part? She had nothing to gain from appearing in the series, I felt, and an awful lot to lose.

In other words, in some cases perhaps, should doctor/patient confidentiality be maintained, whatever the doctor or the patient may think? I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know.What I do know is that Simon Nye’s new comedy How Do You Want Me? (BBC2, Tues) is terrific. The first episode in any series is often immensely ponderous, as the writer fills in the background to the present. Marks and Gran’s Unfinished Business recently suffered a little from this.

In the case of the victim of a minor stroke, his participation was genuinely educational – alerting us to what such an event might be like – while doing him no harm. But religious metaphor in the “hallowed turf” mould seemed to be a little overdone. As Sunderland FC’s new stadium rose against the sunset, choral music was sung and the narrator spoke of “a city without a cathedral, but not for long”. But then the groundsman revealed that the sods from the old pitch had to be reused in the new stadium “for the sake of people that’ve got ashes spread”, and you realised that the metaphor might not be so inappropriate after all.If Premier Passions was primarily a male docusoap, Doctors’ Orders (BBC1, Tues), the beginning of a series on a general practice in Minehead, must attract mostly women. But the same cannot be said of the lachrymose woman whose children were, she insisted, epileptic.

Out of bed, husbands and sons and ex-boyfriends were either utterly boorish, or completely uncomprehending.After a bit I wondered whether much of this was not so much pro-woman as anti-man. The chaps were so pathetic, such ciphers, it was hard to see why they mattered at all. And it is absolutely inconceivable that any drama could get away with portraying women in such a uniformly negative fashion. Personally all this doesn’t bother me too much; it is, after all, pay-back time.