TVScope: Fair City, RTÉ 1, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 8pm and The Clinic RTÉ 1, Sunday, 9.25pm
You may not remember the days when the GP was an imposing figure in the community. Generally speaking, he, and it was almost always a he, tended to be from the right side of the tracks. He wore a tweed jacket which might or might not have those leather patches at the elbows. He had an air of authority.
If you were prescribed a treatment, you would feel guilty about not getting better. Whether this actually helped people to get better I do not know. I do know that today's GP has an array of medicines available which beat any bedside manner.
Today's GPs tend, if they do not mind my saying so, to be fairly normal people. They lead lives which are no more or no less blameless than those of the rest of us. They are not really the stuff of which drama is made. Nor is it an especially romantic calling.
Arrive at your surgery first thing Monday morning to find the first patient in line is waiting to have his ears syringed and notions of drama and romance quickly go out the window.
It is all different in the TV soaps. Fair City's Brendan has romance in bucketfuls and is now, unfortunately, having the drama as well. Over at The Clinic on a Sunday night they have so much romance and drama going on at any one time that it is a wonder they notice the patients at all.
There is something about The Clinic that is a bit, well, clinical. The place is terribly clean. People dress well. They are, as the saying goes, "puffed, powdered and shaved" by the time they get to the surgery door in the morning.
In some ways, The Clinic portrays a model of how the modern practice should be. They've got their doctors and their nurses and their alternative practitioner and, bless them, their counsellor.
They do not seem to have very many patients but, let's face it, they have enough going on in their lives to keep them occupied.
Poor old Brendan sits there in his surgery in Fair City shoving tablets down his throat between consultations and, on a really bad day, telling patients who only dropped in for a chat to stop wasting his time.
Brendan is disintegrating and so well he might. What with the messy affair, now ended, and the baby that nobody must connect to him and the missus publishing a book about having an affair with her brother, it's no wonder Brendan's world has collapsed. Indeed, he has now literally crashed, full of booze and pills, and no doubt will shortly be coming to the attention of the Medical Council.
And yet it is easier to empathise with Brendan than with those spick-and-span medics over at The Clinic.
Brendan has been a hate figure for much of the series but now that his world has collapsed around him, this viewer at least is beginning to feel a bit of sympathy for him. And he's probably about €20 cheaper for a consultation than the crowd at The Clinic.
Medicine, like journalism, tends to be portrayed on television as being a great deal more glamorous than it really is. These images, though, sometimes encourage people into the profession and some of them even stay.
I am not sure that, if I were younger, I would be drawn to the notion of becoming a GP if all I had to go on was Fair City and The Clinic. That is fair enough - they are there to entertain and not to educate.
So enjoy. But don't expect your real-life GP to be part of the sort of seething cauldron of romance and drama that is portrayed on the soaps.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor.