A fine bedside manner has clearly helped doctor-turned-comedian Adam Kay. His latest show, This Is Going To Hurt, details the trials and tribulations of life on the labour ward. He chats to Fedor Tot.
You’ve been interested in standup for a long time, performing whilst in medical school, but when you quit being a doctor, did you intend to end up full-time in comedy and writing?
There’s a long tradition of medical students putting on generally terrible end-of-year shows, making fun of the consultants and professors – I got involved with those a lot when I was at med school. I guess encouraging medical students to enjoy a bit of gallows humour is the closest thing we have to teaching them some kind of coping mechanism for the bad days at work.
When I had my own extremely bad day at work and left medicine in 2010 – sorry, I’ve ruined the ending of the show! – I realised that writing jokes and getting up on stage was the closest thing I had to any kind of skillset beyond working on the wards, so I thought I’d give it a go. I fully expected it would end up being a failed six-month experiment, but to my ongoing surprise it’s still how I pay the gas bill.
Your book and tour describe the ups and downs of being a junior doctor. Was there ever such a thing as a mundane day at work?
I worked on a labour ward and, as anyone who’s ever been on a labour ward in any capacity knows, the days are never mundane – you end up with twice the number of patients you start with, which is unusual for any medical speciality. I guess on a mundane day you manage to leave within two hours of when you’re meant to, no one threatens to kill you, and you only throw away one pair of boxers following a tsunami of blood soaking through your scrubs.
Aside from the anecdotes, is there much about being a doctor that helps in being a stand-up comedian? Dealing with the pressure? Late nights?
I’m certainly very good at the late nights. I can stay up 48 hours writing a script that I’ve failed to do in time, and my body is now trained to just get on with it. I don’t get stressed or nervous these days either – my barometer for stress has been totally ruined by working on the wards. Obviously, the big difference on stage is that the stakes are zero.
You’re not the only ex-medical comedian, with Harry Hill and Paul Sinha also former medical practitioners. Is there any particular reason why a number of you have made that journey?
Rather than recruiting people who are psychologically fit for the job, which you might think would be a sensible approach, medical schools choose people who have lots of extracurricular activities – for example, I had a couple of Grade 8s in music and worked on the school newspaper. If you look at the Wikipedia entry for any famous doctor it’s always been the case: “He proved himself an accomplished rugby player in youth leagues. He excelled as a distance runner and in his final year at school was vice-captain of the athletics team” – and that’s Harold Shipman. It’s potentially not a totally rock-solid system.
There are also huge numbers who’ve had hugely successful careers in sport, such Roger Bannister. If you recruit people with outside interests, I guess some of them will pursue them after their degree.
By the time this interview comes out in print, Brexit will have happened. Or not. Who knows? How equipped is the NHS to deal with, well, any number of potential outcomes?
Make no mistake, Brexit is a disaster for the NHS. The NHS simply couldn’t function without the staff who’ve come here from every country of the world, each one going far beyond the call of duty. The NHS is short of 100,000 members of staff across the UK – making a single member of staff feel unwelcome would be an act of madness. Making tens of thousands of them feel unwelcome is an act of utter self-destruction. The fact that Brexit was sold on the basis of extra money for the NHS was utterly disingenuous – and you’ll struggle to find a member of NHS staff who thinks that Brexit is going to be anything other than a nightmare for them at work.
Adam Kay: This Is Going To Hurt, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Mon 8 (sold out) + Sun 28 Apr; Grand Theatre, Swansea, Tue 16 Apr; Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wed 18 Apr. Tickets: ÂŁ25. Info: www.adamkay.co.uk