Adam Kay (2022) Undoctored. The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients.

Adam Kay (2022) Undoctored. The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients.

Adam Kay jokes he’s the 13^th best-known ex-doctor in Britain. He’s also a comedian. Or ex-comedian, author of the multi-million bestseller This Is Going to Hurt. We therefore already know about his painful, disillusionment with medicine, the only world he knew. The post-traumatic-stress-disorder after too many things went wrong and a baby under his care died. I’m not sure if the mother died too. I’ve got that distance.  I’m not to be what used to be called a burnt-out case (see Graham Greene) nor can I afford to be.

‘Flashback—Formaldehyde.

You know what it’s like when you’re cutting up a dead body. No, of course, you don’t…Unless of course you’re one of the 9000 eighteen-year-olds who sign up for medical school in the UK every year.’

He’d done the work, of course. Got the necessary grades. ‘Everything about my schooling was privileged. I’d wanked in Shackleton’s boat, for god sake.’  

One of the panel of consultants interviewing him knew his dad who was a GP.  His mum was also a doctor. Four out of five of those being interviewed were from private schools.

Being a writer means he’s able to give advice to his eighteen-year-old self. ‘Mostly I’d be brutally honest—it’s a job that means he’ll some really fucked-up stuff be utterly normalised in a health service kept running by the superhuman efforts of the people who worked within it, at incalculable cost to themselves.’

None of this should surprise us. Unless  you’re a Tory Home Secretary such as Jeremy Hunt. I’d some sympathy for Kay’s efforts to find a house he could afford in London. Then, in 2004 or, even more so now.  It beats me how anyone can afford to live in the capital. His boyfriend, ‘J’(ames) worked in film and television as a producer. His income as a writer was described as ‘derisory’.

His comparisons with property and cash-rich privately educated people he knew that hadn’t studied medicine but had fell on their feet in slumming it in areas like banking and finance.  Hmmm.

He skewers former Home Secretary Jeremy Hunt for having written a book that sold less than a measly 1500 copies. Hmmm. I’d be marking that down as a success. But in a middle-class world it doesn’t pay the bills and is a punchline.

The kind of punchline that comedians like Kay can prepare in advance and spout spontaneously on shows in which they are booked by other comedians that have also prepared their material, much like the answers Jeremy Hunt gave to the House of Commons when asked about the multiple failings in the NHS. It’s all a fix.

No wonder the other 62 million of us in the UK that not have these kinds of advantages feel cynical. Kay has churned out a number of books that have built on his multimillion bestselling success of This is Going to Hurt, which fed into a virtuous cycle of an award-winning drama by the same name. There’s no reason why Adam Kay can’t be an award-winning screenwriter, a television comedian who plays to sold-out gigs and a former doctor who has left it all behind. He’s a one off. But I’m not allowing him to play, we were poor card. That’s shite talking. His problems need Undoctored. Read on.