I
t’s a classic dinner party conversation.
Who would play you in the TV show of
your life? When news first broke that
his diaries were going to be made into
a series, Adam Kay told the press that
he was hoping Judi Dench would play him.
“I didn’t want to jinx it,” he tells me now.
“So I was naming grandes dames of theatre.”
But right from the start there was one
actor at the top of his wish list. “Since
moment one I knew it had to be Ben.”
We’re talking about the BBC adaptation
of This Is Going to Hurt, Kay’s warts-ulcers-
and-all account of his time as a frazzled
junior doctor in an obstetrics and
gynaecology department (“brats and twats”
as it was known at Kay’s med school). The
book, a riotous account of degloved penises,
tsunamis of amniotic fluid and the
heartbreaks of frontline healthcare, topped
the bestseller charts for a record-shredding
nine months after its publication in 2017. It
has since sold more than 1.5 million copies,
been translated into 37 languages and won
book of the year at the National Book
awards. Kay became a literary sensation and
went on to advise the government about
the state of healthcare. He also became
a columnist for this magazine. In other
words, it went well.
Now the TV adaptation has arrived,
one of the most hotly anticipated of the
year. Outstandingly witty and frequently
heartbreaking, it’s not always easy to
watch. All the gory emergencies and
improvisations of an NHS labour ward are
there, accompanied by the split-second,
life-and-death decisions with which all
doctors must cope.
In a wider sense it is a portrait of a man
failing to process trauma, hiding his pain
behind emotional distance and jokes.
Because that’s what is at the heart of Kay’s
diaries — humour masking a life being
dismantled by years of sleep deprivation
and overwork. The full stop to his medical
career came when a horrific complication
during a caesarean ended in tragedy. As one
brutally honest consultant puts it, at the
end of any successful career in maternity
“there’s a busload of dead babies with your
name on it”. The show is a comedy, but one
of the darker ones.
For this interview we’re in a studio
with luxury oversized chairs that are
impossible to sit on right. Kay perches on
the edge, leaning forwards — eyes worried,
mouth twitching with mischief. The
other Adam Kay, the screen version played
not by Dame Judi but by the film star
Ben Whishaw, sits as far back in the other
chair as he can. Equipment clanks in the
background in preparation for today’s
photoshoot.
“We were hoping they’d forgotten the
camera,” Kay admits. What would his
ideal photoshoot be, then? “One where
you can wear your own clothes and do it
over the phone.”The process of finding an actor to play
you begins, Kay says, like dating — you have
to be chosen too, after all. After sending a
script to Whishaw’s agent, the pair met at
a café in Covent Garden. “Were you sussing
me out, thinking, ‘Can I play you?’ ” Kay
asks. Whishaw says he had been avoiding
that thought. “I still feel shy,” he says of
interpreting the character, not just because
the character is sitting right next to him.
“What you wrote was so unsparing andintimate. I wonder how I would feel, giving
that to someone else. It’s strange.”
“I love that he’s an antihero,” he
continues. “He’s very funny, quite cruel and
clever, but he has this disability — I’m not
saying you have a disability!” He places a
reassuring hand on Kay’s knee. Whishaw
recalls something else from that first
meeting. “We were talking about the
character like it wasn’t you.”
That was for self-protection, Kay explains.
Whether he’s dismissing a junior colleague
as “a waste of organs”, leaning on a patient to
drop a complaint or being deliberately cold
to his devoted, long-suffering boyfriend,
“he’s not the nicest”, Kay says of his screen
self. “When someone in a script meeting is
saying, ‘Adam is such a dick in this scene,
I hate him,’ you’re glad they’re saying ‘him’
and not ‘you’.” The scenes he most enjoyed
writing were the ones in which Adam
interacts with people who openly despise
him. Kay himself makes a brief cameo, as
a cyclist who hurls abuse at Adam. He has
taken the matter to his therapist, he jokes.“I quit my job and my
relationship exploded. It
looked like a breakdown,
and it probably was.
I had no plan B”
Adam Kay has not ruled out returning to
medicine. Left: reading with his dog, Pippin12 • The Sunday Times Magazine