Public Servant Lifestyle

From the Carry On... films to Only When I Laugh, from Dirk Bogardes' 'Doctor series to Tony Hancock in The Blood Donor ("a pint? That's nearly an armful" etc...) to Scrubs the medical situation comedy is a humour stand by. We look at the genesis of the much-missed BBC series Doctors And Nurses and ask ourselves 'can even Adrian Edmondson make orthopaedic surgeons funny?'

Doctors And Nurses

Doctors and Nurses, starring Adrian (The Young Ones, The Comic Strip Presents, Bottom etc...) Edmondson, centres on the love-hate relationship between two orthopaedic surgeons based on the Isle of Wight.

Writer, Dr Phil Hammond, co-writer of BBC One’s comedy series Doctors And Nurses, who makes his acting debut in the series third episode tells us how being in front of the cameras was a very different prescription in his busy career.

In Seeing Stars, Phil plays a surgeon who breaks the news to George Banatwala (Madhav Sharma) that he’s just given the kiss of life to the local vagrant, whom George thought was a dignitary! “I got the part because we wanted an arrogant, posh idiot and, for some reason, I seemed to fit the bill,” says Phil: “I was also very cheap and it was only for one scene so I’d need to be really bad to ruin it.

“From a writer’s perspective, I wanted the insight of rehearsing with the cast and feeling the pressure on recording day.” Phil is used to being on stage in front of an audience. He completed his first solo stand-up tour, 89 Minutes To Save The NHS, last year, but he admits recording for television is very different: “It was much harder than being on stage. There are lots of tricks to screen acting, like cheating your eye-line so you get more of your face in shot, and keeping movements to a minimum as they are greatly exaggerated.

Medicine

“Unfortunately, no-one told me this until afterwards, so all you get is my ugly profile thrashing about like a grounded mackerel. But at least I didn’t upstage the stars!” So, Phil can now add acting to his long list of skills. He became a GP in 1991, switching to sexual health medicine after 10 years, but is now kept busy with writing, broadcasting and stand-up comedy.

He’s presented five series of Trust Me, I’m A Doctor on BBC Two and written a book of the same title. Phil has enjoyed sell-out shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, has written Private Eye’s medical column since 1992 and is Vice-President of the Patients’ Association. He also fronted 28 Minutes To Save The NHS on Radio 4, and has recently been working on a documentary about the history of anaesthetics.

Phil was invited to co-write Doctors And Nurses by Nigel Smith. Nigel had the idea for the sitcom but realised he had a problem with the writing. “When I started working on it, it soon became apparent that I ran a terrible risk of making a complete fool of myself if I got the details of the working practices of a hospital wrong,” says Nigel: “The choice was simple: either spend years learning one end of a catheter from another or ask someone else to help with that and stick to writing jokes. Ten seconds later, I rang the country’s foremost medical humorist to ask him to join me. Unfortunately, he wasn’t available so I asked Phil!”

Nigel ignited Phil’s enthusiasm for writing a sitcom. Phil reveals: “The sitcom offered the chance to bring to life issues I care passionately about in a fictional hospital
with fictional characters; much safer than investigative journalism and a lot more constructive, too!”

Doctors And Nurses centres on the love-hate relationship between two orthopaedic surgeons on the Isle of Wight: Dr Roy Glover, played by Adrian Edmondson, and George Banatawala (Sharma).

People may wonder whether Roy Glover is based on Phil, but Nigel is quick to point out that this is not the case: “Roy is a working-class boy, made-sort-of-good, underachieving, petty, childish and simmering with repressed jealousy over his colleague’s talent, money and success. Not sure which one of us that describes but it’s not Phil Hammond.”

BBC Radio 4

Writing Doctors And Nurses wasn’t easy for Phil. “Nigel encouraged me to keep writing sketch comedy and stand-up, and we developed a BBC Radio 4 series, 28 Minutes To Save The NHS, co-written with David Spicer,” he says: “I subsequently took it as one-man show to Edinburgh, and on a 60-date UK tour. The tour gave me a much clearer idea about what material would work best with a public audience, but sitcom is much harder to master than stand-up and my first attempts floundered.

“Writing a sitcom requires you to go over and over it until you get it as good as it can possibly be – it’s a bit like starting with a heart transplant, then changing your mind, doing bowel surgery, whipping out the gall-bladder, putting it back in again and then deciding you’ve got the wrong patient and starting again on someone else.”

In Doctors And Nurses, Roy Glover is on a one-man mission to save the NHS. “The characters are clearly defined and different, and above all, real,” explains Phil: “Doctors have never been gods and nurses aren’t super-human machines. They’re just humans trying to do a good job under very difficult conditions.”

Phil continues: “Roy passionately believes in the principles of the NHS but gets very frustrated that it doesn’t work in practice. He comes to work on the bus, not because he can’t afford a car, but because ‘I’m a socialist’, and he despises private medicine. But he has the same hypocritical envy of us all. He’d like George’s ability, but he’d also like the lovely house and the Bentley that private practice has brought him.” Each week, Roy battles with George over their approach to work, although deep down they do like and respect each other.

Phil says: “George seems to have it all. His surgical ability makes him indispensable, and so he is able to play the system to his own advantage, building up his NHS waiting lists and maximizing his private income. George is definitely teaching hospital material, but he was stuffed by the appointments system and ended up on the Isle of Wight. However, he’s so desperate to be part of the medical establishment that he’s blinded to his fate, convinced that one day he will be reinstated at Bart’s.”

In the meantime, George compensates for his disappointment by accumulating the wealth of rich pensioners with dodgy hips, but as Phil explains: “George’s technical ability is not matched by his communication skills, and he’s often reliant on Roy to talk him out of trouble. “Theirs is a symbiotic love-hate relationship. Roy likes being a big fish in a small pool, and is too frightened to leave. George would love to, but no-one will have him.”

Adrian Edmondson

Phil thinks Adrian Edmondson is perfect or the part of Roy: “Adrian has great depth as an actor – he can deliver a whole range of emotions and do great physical comedy, too. Although Vyvyan in The Young Ones was a medical student, Roy’s character is more complex, less manic and a lot warmer. He’s the glue that binds it all together, articulating the same frustrations about the NHS that we all have.

"His great skill is being able to combine the knockabout elements of traditional sitcom with satirical observations on the state of the Health Service. I’d like him to be my doctor!” Doctors And Nurses has been a labour of love for both Phil and Nigel, but Phil hopes it helps people ‘get real about the NHS’.

“Much of the power of medicine comes from this cosy belief that doctors are shining knights with magic bullets who can save us all from prolonged suffering and premature death,” says Phil: “True, we can do some great things, but often we just obscure the inevitability of death. So let’s not expect too much of the NHS. The staff are human and all of us are fallible.”

Doctors And Nurses, starring David Mitchell, Mina Anwar, Adrian Edmondson, Steven Alvey, Abigail Cruttenden and George Madhav Sharma – has yet to make it onto DVD. Time to start that letter writing campaign to the Beeb now perhaps?

Doctors And Nurses images are copyright: BBC.

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