He enjoyed Kay’s acerbic writing style.
“The scenes are brilliantly rhythmical.
Everyone gives as good as they get,” he says.
Kay is tickled by this. “You need to have
more arguments in real life then, Ben.
They’re great.”
Although he no longer has to study him,
Whishaw still finds Kay fascinating. “This is
personal,” he says to Kay, “but ... when you
stopped medicine, did you know what you
were going to do?” Far from it.
“I quit my job and my relationship
exploded within a month,” Kay replies.
“From the outside it looked like a
breakdown, and it probably was. I had no
plan B.” The couple sold their flat, which
gave Kay a financial buffer of six months in
which he decided to explore his creative
side. He was working as a “gun for hire”
comedy writer before a diary performance
at the Edinburgh Festival led to a meeting
with a publisher.K
ay has described feeling
funnelled into medicine from
a young age — with a doctor
for a father and two of his three
siblings also going into
medicine. Somewhere between leaving
Dulwich College and graduating from
Imperial College he knew he “didn’t adore”
his chosen career, but by then it was too
late. It is telling, perhaps, that he founded
a musical parodies band — Amateur
Transplants — at university.
Whishaw had no such pressure to get
a proper job. His first love — acting — was
encouraged by his parents. “Go for it, son,
do what you want,” they told him, and by
the time he graduated from Rada in 2003
he already had a long list of credits with
various youth theatre groups to his name.
Kay looks momentarily forlorn at the
thought of Whishaw’s upbringing. “I wish
your parents could have had a chat with my
parents.” Then he relents. “Parents want the
best for their kids. That’s what they knew.”
When Kay left medicine suddenly in
2010, at the relatively senior position of
registrar, he was only the second person in
his cohort of 300 to do so. “Now I barely
know any doctors who don’t have a plan B,”
he says, adding that medical schools are
disingenuous about the nature of the bad
days. Without support, doctors find
disastrous coping mechanisms when things
go wrong, “like being rude to people or
bottling it all up and not talking to your
loved ones at home”. And things, invariably,
will go wrong, even in a service that isn’t
short of 100,000 members of staff. “How do
you do three people’s jobs? You can do it for
a week, but for ever?”
In November the proportion of midwives
thinking of leaving the NHS reached 50 per
cent. Many took to the streets and staged
vigils across the country, protesting at
staffing levels they describe as unsafe. Kay
understands their desperation. He startedperforming his diaries in 2016 in support of
striking junior doctors, whom he felt were
being portrayed as greedy and callous
rather than deeply conscientious.
His voice softens when he talks about
things that really matter to him. “There are
lots of ways to have healthcare but only ours
will never care about your bank balance,
only your clinical need. With every other
model people fall through the cracks, and
those with the quietest voices get the worst
care.” Will we still have a recognisable NHS
in 30 years? “I hope so,” is all he can say.
Some things are improving. Kay’s diaries
closed with an excoriating open letter to
the health secretary at the time, Jeremy
Hunt. After pressure from the public,“I think I’ve got a sad
face,” he deadpans.
“People just want me
to suffer and be in
turmoil all the time”
Whishaw has been Q to Daniel Craig’s
Bond three times, left. He began his
career in youth theatre. Below left: on stage
in 2005’s controversial Mercury FurROLLNECK BY PRIVATE WHITE VC. PINSTRIPE TROUSERS BY KINGSMAN. LANDMARK MEDIA, MARK ELLIDGE / TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD
The Sunday Times Magazine • 15