Even though Dr Finlay was a long-dead Scottish Nationalist, he was still a good man and his patients and his viewers loved him. Beamed into 1960s city homes from the 1920s semi-rural Scottish town of Tannochbrae, Dr Finlay represented a British ideal: the personal and local physician, the man who both knew and cared about you. From the boil on your bum to an outbreak of typhoid, Dr Finlay - or his crustier partner, Dr Cameron - would work out what to do.

At that time my mother worked as a receptionist/clerk in a new-fangled group GP practice in North London. This was an interesting and sometimes controversial departure from the single (or double) doctor surgeries, and allowed the employment of a practice nurse or two. But, in essence, it was Dr Finlay in the sticks. And so it has been in this country, down what Peter Sellers once called the “vast aeons of time”. It is part of our national tradition.

Now, along comes Lord Darzi of Denham, G. Brown's Minister of Health, with a suggestion that could create an epistemological break - the polyclinic.

This super-practice, which can combine under one roof the services of GPs, dentists, podiatrists, psychiatrists and sundry other -ists could, he argues, deliver better and more coherent healthcare for patients, and substantially reduce the amount of time they may have to spend in hospitals. Lord Darzi would eventually like 150 of these behemoths to be established nationwide, and wants nine in London by the spring of next year.

To judge by the reactions of local doctors and national patients groups, Lord Darzi - who is, as one of them rather sniffily pointed out to me, “a surgeon” - has much convincing to do. When I spoke to the much-quoted Patients' Association yesterday, their spokesman was sure that patients would prefer the existing system of seeing “their own doctor”. “They know our families,” he told me, “they know our histories” - right down to being able to discern inherited patterns in their patients.

But how, I asked him, did his organisation know that patients would prefer the outcomes offered by polyclinics (of which we have very few) to those they achieve through small-practice GPs? Well, he told me, their helpline spoke to several thousand people every week, and the strong impression was that folk “didn't want to see any old Tom Dick or Harry”. In any case, the Patients Association was influenced in its views by the reaction of the British Medical Association and GPs' groups, because these were people with the best interests of patients at heart.

There is a circularity about this approach, which, in effect, deprives patients of an analysis based on their interests, as opposed to those of doctors. But what do the doctors argue? Richard Vautrey, of the GPs' committee of the British Medical Association, has been the chief voice raised at the weekend in opposition to Lord Darzi. He was principally worried about the loss of the role of medical generalist. The new specialists, he claimed, such as those looking at children's or women's problems, would “undermine” GPs and mean that doctors would no longer “provide a holistic, generalised service that patients really value”. He added: “When patients come in with undifferentiated symptoms, you need someone who can look at the whole picture, not home in on one small area of a patient's body.”

When I saw this claim, I thought long and hard about it. And decided that this “holistic” approach, is, in fact, code for “inexpert”. What I increasingly want from a practice is accurate and fast diagnosis and screening, combined with the best possible advice about my condition. At the moment I tend to use my GP's practice as a way of getting referral to specialists and accessing prescriptions that I have already decided that I need. For some time the idea of the same doctor seeing both me and my family has been a fiction, and - because of holidays, timetables and so on - none of us tends to see the same doctor twice in a row. I would like a relationship, but I would much prefer an expert. It is all very well for a newspaper to caption a cosy GP photo with the words “The family doctor: the cornerstone of personal, continuous patient care”; the question is how good this continuous care is.

Might it not be better to travel slightly farther to a practice where there is a nutritionist (doctors are simply not trained in nutrition in this country), a cardiologist, where - like the Heart of Hounslow polyclinic in West London - there's diabetes screening, STD clinics, leg ulcer clinics, physiotherapists and dentists, as well as 18 family doctors? And perhaps this is why the polyclinic system is used in places as far apart as Scandinavia and Australia.

And Soviet Russia. In The Observer on Sunday the polyclinic story was headlined: “GPs' leader hits out at plans for Soviet-style ‘polyclinics'.” This, apparently, was the description by Laurence Buckman, of the BMA, and it immediately sounded my bulls**t alarm. If you have a good argument - and polyclinics being medically inferior would be a clincher - you don't have to throw in a extraneous argument, yet here were several.

Polyclinics were “London-centric” because they don't suit non-urban areas. But the vast majority of Britons live in urban areas. The polyclinics would be “in competition with hospitals”. So what? They would be open to private companies to run. Who cares? “The Government are imposing this centralised plan on to everyone whether they need it or not.” They're not. They would be “in competition directly with existing practices”. They probably wouldn't, but if GPs were so confident of the “personal continuity” demand, then this wouldn't matter too much.

One GP further complained of how polyclinics were part of “this 24-hour, consumerist environment [which] has raised demands for a ‘dial-a-pizza' approach to healthcare - instant gratification with least discomfort - with the profit-based business model that motivates supermarkets”. It is hard to imagine a more contemptuous attitude towards patient demand. When did illness stop being 24 hour? And since when was minimising discomfort regarded as being somehow un-NHS?

How, also, should we break it to the benighted Sovietised Swedes and Australians, that -deprived of the personal touch - they are suffering inferior healthcare to that of the average Briton? Or might we admit to ourselves that the old notion of the cradle-to-grave GP is as real as Tannochbrae?

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