The "Defective Detective"

Sometimes it seems - particularly in the States - as though every possible twist and variation on the tried and trusted cop show has been done. But occasionally, something comes along that's so out of the blue, so unexpected that it make you site up, take notice and hold out hope that maybe, just maybe, there are a few new ideas left.

One such show in the excellent Monk which offers us something we've never see in a cop show before - a hero who suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder. Adrian Monk is a former cop traumatised by the death of his wife in a car bomb attack who spent three years locked in his house refusing to leave before finally being coaxed out by his nurse Sharona who continues to help him now that he's doing consultancy work for the police. Afflicted from an early age with obsessive-compulsive disorder which now gives him a compulsive attention to detail, allowing him to spot clues and patterns that the cops may have missed.

At first it might look like that the OCD angle is just a gimmick, a cheap attempt to ring the changes in a show which would otherwise have been a fairly ordinary, if well made and acted, police procedural. But although there were a few dissenting voices, there was plenty of praise for the show from medical community, mainly because, although the depiction of OCD isn't completely accurate, it was the first popular show to highlight the condition and give audiences an insight into what can be a very strange and distressing disorder.

OCD affects very few people - only between 1 and 3.3% - but the effects on its sufferers can be devastating. While studying for a psychology degree many years ago, my class was shown a video of a young woman affected by OCD and her attempts to get through an ordinary day while struggling with her many tics and obsessions. Watching the poor woman trying to leave her house while obsessing over things like how ajar all the internal doors were was deeply affecting and remains one of the most enduring images from my three years of study.

Monk displays many of the more characteristic oddities of the average OCD sufferer - he obsesses about germs and, in one of the most common traits, is fixated on symmetry, always trying to impose order of a chaotic world. It's rare for a real life sufferer to exhibit quite as many of the symptoms as Monk displays but everything he does is characteristic of the disorder. As such, although Monk is often played for gentle humour, there is an underlying sense of the very real torment that sufferers can experience.

And those sufferers themselves seem to have warmed to the character of Monk and seem more than happy that their ailment has been given some long overdue exposure, helping to bust some of the myths surrounding it. As Monk began its third season in 2004, Patricia Perkins, executive director of the Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation and an OCD sufferer herself, surveyed the many emails she had been receiving regarding the show and found that the majority of OCD sufferers were in favour of the show and what it was trying to do.

The beauty of the show is that, although you'll laugh at some of Monk's more eccentric behaviour, it never invites you to laugh at Monk himself. It helps to remove some of the stigma and fear of the illness that can result when the non-afflicted first encounter an OCD sufferer [it can be very distressing in the most severe cases]. It helps that Monk is played with sensitivity by the brilliant Tony Shalhoub, whose performance is outstanding and has helped to raise the public profile of OCD, particularly in the States - so much so that Shalhoub has claimed, with some justification, that his character is now the "poster boy" for OCD sufferers.

If, like me, you came late to Monk, you're got a real treat in store as you try to catch up - and you really should. Its a genuinely offbeat show that mixes comedy with sleuthing better than anything else we've seen in recent years. If you haven't succumbed to the eccentric charms of TV's most unusual detective, pop over to the competition page where you could win one of five boxsets of season four up for grabs - I promise you won't regret it!