The nation’s favourite ex-doctor turned comic, Adam Kay brings his sell-out Fringe show Undoctored to Stratford’s Play House this Saturday (18th January, 3pm and 7.30pm). He tells Gill Sutherland about what to expect and his love for the NHS
You’re coming up the road from your home in Oxfordshire to kick your new tour off in Stratford, do you come up here much?
It is up the road, I’m there a lot. In fact, it’s where my favourite cinema is – the Everyman is like business-class cinema.I’ve seen a whole bunch of stuff at the theatre. I played there a couple of years ago when they had a comedy night. It’s just a lovely place.
Adam Kay
What’s your favourite thing you’ve seen at the theatre… or performance?
Most recently I went to see The Producers in London, that was spectacular.I’m a massive fan of the band Pulp, to the point of borderline stalking. When I was at university, I think I went to see them seven or eight shows on the same tour. So that level of fan. About a year ago, they did a new tour, Greatest Hits sort of thing. And I saw their last show at the Hammersmith Apollo, which was amazing. One of my life highlights was Jarvis doing the soundtrack for the adaptation of This Is Going To Hurt. Which was a huge thing for me. He did an amazing job.
You rose to fame after the huge success of your book This Is Going To Hurt, published in 2017, which documented your time as a young doctor in the NHS. What was it that made the book that grabbed so many people?
I think ultimately it’s probably a combination of a couple of things. It’s our rightful love for the NHS, our greatest achievement as a civilised nation. I’m not the first person to do a sort of medical biography, but I approached it in an unusual way. I majored on the humour and the disgusting elements. The British love those sort of stories, and so that was probably a big part of it as well. And there’s an element of luck: it was the right book at the right time.It certainly caught on more than I could have ever imagined it would.
There’s that revelatory element as well: the insights into what goes on behind closed doors – do any of us know what really goes on at the NHS. Was that part of motive as well, giving that insight?
I think so. And not just sort of peeking behind the blue curtain side of it. Also something that book did that I don’t think I’d seen much of before is what it’s like as a human being as well as a doctor.It has that impact on the person, and also what it’s like having a life and being at home and that side of things. I think people were interested in that. With programmes like ER and House you saw all these amazing heroics on the ward – that had been done.
Remind us of how you went from being a doctor to being a performer.
Adam Kay Undoctored
I left medicine in 2010 after a bad day at work. And I sort of realised I couldn’t go on anymore with working on the labour ward.What it demanded of me was more that I was sort of emotionally capable of, and I stepped away. I thought I’d be stepping away for a few months while I got myself back together, and then probably go back to a different branch of medicine, general practice or something.I didn’t really know what else I could do, because I’d gone straight from medical school to my first job as a doctor and never really stopped to do anything else.
There’s this tradition of medical school reviews – getting up on stage and making fun of your consultants and professors and whatever. I’d done that so I fancied having a go at comedy. I did a bit at the Fringe and enjoyed it. But being a comedian is a very part-time job – most of the gigs are Friday, Saturday nights and there’s a lot of driving. You’re essentially doing two gigs a week and each of those are 15 minutes. Half an hour isn’t very much work a week.
A lot of time on my own made me start writing. And I ended up writing for television. So I was a jobbing writer for telly for ages, maybe ten years.Then around the time of the first junior doctor strikes [circa 2016] I revisited the diaries that I’d kept at the time while I was working as a doctor, and I started reading those out on stage.And then that became the book that This Is Going To Hurt.
Did you read straight from them or did you embellish and revisit?
When it started as a show, I was literally just reading exactly what was written down. Obviously, I was just choosing the best ones and the funny ones. But that wasn’t that many diary entries. When it became a book, that was very different because I had to go through a huge number of shoeboxes full of notebooks, pieces of paper and Post-it notes. And it was a case of choosing the ones that best told the story. As it was getting published, there were lots of things I needed to change for legal reasons.But by and large, it’s close to what I wrote at the time, but obviously edited. Initially I wanted to keep it raw and the publishers humoured me at first, but it did get a sort of proper proofread. But what I did do, so I could keep it closer to the actual originals, is it’s all peppered with footnotes. It means I don’t need to stop and explain what a ventouse delivery is because I can just do a footnote on that. And that makes it easy to read on stage.
As a child, were you good at anecdotes, performing and writing?
I was definitely always the class clown, in the absence of any other things like being good at rugby, to stop me getting bullied or something. That was my way of doing it as a weedy child. And yeah, I’d always enjoyed being creative, and was quite musical. But none of that was really open to me as a career.
Your dad was a doctor – was that was what was expected of you?
It was sort of expected that’s what I would end up doing. It’s not that my creative ambitions were deliberately thwarted, just my parents wanting the best for their children, trying to help them make ‘sensible’ choices.
You’ve got three siblings, are any of those doctors?
So there’s four of us. And our degrees that we did were medicine, medicine, law, medicine. You get the general vibe of the sort of family it was.
Your parents got a full house there! And just moving on to Undoctored – the standup show you’ll be doing in Stratford, which is based on your book of the same name, which is kind of more free ranging and more personal than This Is Going To Hurt. Tell us about that.
I thought a lot about what my next book should be. My first thought was I just go back through my diaries and then see what else there is. I started doing that, but it was quite clear to me going back through itwhilst there was still some good stuff in there, I’d used the Premier League stuff already. Because why wouldn’t I? I assumed that 35 people would buy a copy and we’d never speak of it again.I had to think about things I hadn’t spoken about in This Is Going To Hurt, like medical school, and then the period after I left medicine which is when that first book ended. Whilst I’ve not done any medicine since, I’ve been a patient a lot… and doctors basically make very bad, bad patients.There were a few interesting stories I wanted to share. So I just started writing them down and what it ended up being was both a sort of a prequel and a sequel to This Is Going To Hurt.
Ben Whishaw starred as Adam in the BBC adaptation of This Is Going To Hurt.
It’s called Undoctored. Do you ever miss being a doctor or feel guilty about leaving the profession?
Yes to both. I feel hugely guilty about leaving with all the time, money and effort that was invested in my medical education. I’ve walked away from it, and equally I miss it. Obviously, the arts have the most enormous value, but you’d have to have quite the ego as a writer or a comedian to say that what you do there compares to saving a mum or a baby’s life on a labour ward. Personally, nothing has matched that feeling of being useful, like a sort of proper member of society. It’s a big thing to wave goodbye to.
Are you once a doctor, always a doctor? Do people still come up to you and say, I’ve got a lump in my wherever?
Yes. I mean, decreasingly. I’ve been 14 years out of the game.It’s a pretty major roll of the dice to ask me for medical advice these days. But once a doctor, always a doctor in the sense that if there’s an emergency, then you’re first to try and be useful. We’ve had quite a lot of emergencies at my shows.There’ll be a call, ‘we need some help here!’ Lights go up. A lot of people who work for the NHS do come and see my shows, so it turns out they are probably the safest place in the UK to have an emergency. ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ Ten hands go up. ‘How many paramedics do you want and how many nurses? We’ve got the full multidisciplinary team here.’
Tell us about the stage show and what it takes from the book – there’s some profoundly deep stuff from your life and some traumatic moments, too – how does that translate into a stage show?
It’s essentially me telling stories from medical school and from the wards and from basically majoring on the funny stuff. It is 90 per cent a comedy. I don’t think people want to hear too much of my personal stuff.I think you have a responsibility if you’re writing a book or putting on a show to make people think about the world a bit differently. And so 10 per cent of the show is the bit that I want people to be thinking and chatting about as they head home. And so the show ultimately talks about why so many people are leaving the health care professions at the moment, and whether we are doing enough to support them. And if one of the major reasons is we’re not looking after our staff well enough in all sorts of ways. And everything that I say, even though it’s ostensibly a funny show, ties back into that theme.And whether they work in the health service or probably more importantly, if they don’t, to sort of re-evaluate our relationship with the people who keep the rest of us on the road. That’s essentially what the show is.
n The follow up to This Is Going To Hurt, Undoctored
I understand that there’s always a call to do a greatest hit or two, which includes the infamous ‘de-gloving incident’…
I performed This Is Going To Hurt, the live show, to I think 300,000 people. And I thought the new show needs to be a new show. There wasn’t a syllable in this show that was from the previous one because no one wants that. And so I started doing it. In the first show, people were like, ‘yeah, but you didn’t do that story’. And it was generally the de-gloving one. And so I sort of ignored that for a few shows.But I didn’t want to be like a low rent version of the pop star who does the latest album and doesn’t do any of that, so I included that particularly disgusting de-gloving story to keep the audience at bay and give them what they want. And it turns out what people want are disgusting stories. [No spoilers, but the ‘degloving story’ may make male, er, members wince in particular.]
This Is Going To Hurt was adapted for the BBC, starring Ben Wishaw as yourself. Is there plans to televise Undoctored?
Lots of people watched it and it won a bunch of stuff. There was an appetite for doing the TV version of Undoctored, which was very flattering. But I think I’ve told enough of me on telly.I spent like four years doing my best job I thought I could do in adapting This Is Going To Hurt. I didn’t then want to rush out another series of scripts in six months and everyone be like, ‘oh yeah, but the first one was better’.
Like many I’m just hankering to see Ben Whishaw make his return as you.
Oh, he’s so good, isn’t he?
Are you friendly with him?
Yes, he’s a good mate. He stayed over with us not long ago. I see him both personally as a friend and then in huge admiration watching him on stage. Lovely.
n Adam’s first book This Is Going To Hurt
What else are you currently busy on?
The main thing that’s keeping me busy is I’ve got my first novel for adults coming out in September. So I’m deep into that. It’s called A Particularly Nasty Case, and it is medical crime. Basically, there’s a doctor, consultant rheumatologist with a history of mental illness. He believes that another doctor has been murdered in his hospital and no one else thinks they have, including the coroner and the police. And so it’s basically, I do an ‘if done it’.
One final question, the NHS is very much on our news agenda in Stratford, you’ve been on the inside, what do you think the future of the health service is?
My heart goes out to anyone who’s on the frontline, including all my former colleague. I don’t think I painted a particularly rosy picture of the NHS in This Is Going To Hurt and my other writing. But in retrospect, I think that was the good old days. I think things are so tough now. The NHS is at a real crossroads, and I think this new government have got an enormous task on their hands.Something I don’t think is necessarily talked about enough, and in my opinion the biggest crisis in this huge casserole of crises, is the retention of staff. There’s a lot of talk about recruiting more people, but to my mind, there’s no point running the taps harder if the plug’s out. And the plug is definitely out. The NHS needs to think about how it can become a better employer. It’s not just about pay, treat your staff well. Ultimately ou don’t have the staff, you don’t have the system.Undoctored calls in at the Stratford Play House this Saturday with shows at 3pm and 7.30pm.