Fans of LIVING’s top shows can consider themselves spoiled rotten this week, as their favourite channel beats the January blues with the UK premiere of the fifth series of the incomparable Greyís Anatomy, airing closer than ever before to the US transmission. The tears from last season’s dramatic finale may hardly have died down to a sniffle, but viewers are already taken back to Seattle Grace hospital for more from Meredith, Derek, Cristina, Izzie, George, Miranda and all the other staff of this most entertaining of hospitals, where love, life and death are always just a scalpel’s width away.

Thankfully, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) and Derek (Patrick Dempsey)‘s relationship has survived the inter-season break, but she is anxious about what follows “happily ever after”, and how it is affecting her friendship with Cristina (Sandra Oh, Sideways). Fortunately Cristina’s got something a little more dishy to think about, in the shape of military surgeon Dr Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd, Trainspotting), who captures her attention by performing a field tracheotomy whilst injured, before sewing up his own injuries without anaesthetic.

That’s not all that’s going on at Seattle Grace at the start of this eagerly-anticipated fifth series. The hospital itself has been criticised for poor performance, so patients are heading elsewhere – or they would, if it wasn’t for the formidable ice storm outside. There are important lessons, both personal and physiological, to be learned, and two limousines full of injured people to treat, so scrub up and join the doctors for January’s most entertaining TV, this week on LIVING.

PREMIERES THURSDAY 22ND, 10PM ON LIVING