There are 177 episodes of House, the 00s hospital drama starring Hugh Laurie as a brilliant but cantankerous doctor. What this means, to my dismay, is that I spent five entire days, five hours and 15 minutes of this autumn watching this series. In my defence, when I embarked on this rewatch, I was going through quite a trying time in my life. But I would find it difficult to excuse the fact that I didn’t just watch some House to take the edge off things, but attempted every single episode.

It’s a deranged television programme. It’s a tall order to select only a top 10 of the most bonkers plotlines – but here’s a representative handful. House kidnaps the star of his favourite medical soap opera because he has diagnosed him with a brain tumour just by watching him on TV. House pays an actor to pretend to die so that he can freak out his staff by bringing her “back to life” in the morgue. House performs surgery on his own leg in his bathtub to excise the tumours he got from taking medicine only approved for use on rats. A member of House’s team spends a whole episode trying to convince a suicidal patient that he deserves to live and is not a bad person, before it is revealed that the........

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