I am a former NHS midwife. I gave up practising due to the negative impact on my mental health. What’s the most important factor in retaining obs & gynae doctors and midwi ves? I had to work out what do I want the TV show to be about, and I really wanted it to be centred and focused on the mental health of healthcare professionals. The first scene I wrote of the series was the moment where Shruti, one of the junior doctors, makes the decision and turns to camera and say she’s going to take her life. And every moment in this series up to then was building up to that moment.’ Were there any aspects of the TV adaptation that veered away from the intent you had in the book, due to trauma being censored ot subtlety lost? Something that gave me hope through the pandemic – and continues to – is the public love for the NHS. I feel strongly that, were the NHS to come under any major existential threat, people would get to their feet and fight for it. I’m fortunate to get to meet medical students, nursing students and midwifery students, and get enormous hope from their energy. The NHS is in the safest hands – if it gets over the current bump in the road.

What the author lays out on the table during Undoctored makes it perhaps a more challenging read even than This Is Going To Hurt in places – but of course always undercut with Kay’s trademark humour (‘my coping mechanism’, he says). However, he also admits how difficult it was to be so upfront, especially when he thought he might get ‘some kind of hatred’ for doing so. It took Covid: I offered and it turned out they didn’t want a gynaecologist who hadn’t worked for a decade. I will doubtless return when I reach my expiry date as an author, as all authors do. I suspect I’ve done my last shift on a labour ward but I think I potentially have something to give in education or policy within the service. The mood music isn’t that there’s going to be a huge amount of extra money going into the NHS anytime soon, what with everything going on. So God bless everyone who’s working in the NHS at the moment. I really don’t know how they’re doing it.’ The thing that I thought as soon as I started watching the rushes come together, and then a bunch of doctors have said to me, is I can’t believe they’re not actually doctors, midwives and nurses, because they just embodied it so well. I think Ambika in particular, for someone who had basically done practically nothing on-screen before – she’s just such an intelligent, nuanced actor.’Stand-up is both diagnosis of pain and cure: the fury and the laughter that soothes it. I’m not surprised he wanted to bring babies into the world: he is all in pieces. I now see Kay’s attempt at medicine as a great act of transference: to heal others at the expense of himself; to birth others who would be happier than himself, in a kind of thwarted renewal. Kay is still a big supporter of the medical community, despite having hung up his scrubs (Picture: Dusty Miller) It’s difficult not to despair but is there anything in the current situation with the NHS that gives you hope?

Behind Kay’s intensely critical voice – the one I objected to in This Is Going to Hurt, when it faced his female patients – the voice that whirrs on, presumably full time in his head, is his mother’s. Perhaps it is artistic licence, perhaps exaggeration, but he presents his mother as intensely critical, oblivious to his pain. Though medicine broke him, she yearned for him to return to it, as if she could not hear. He needed a microphone. However, Kay’s career transition was anything but smooth, as he reveals in Undoctored, which gives an unflinching account of some of the most private and vulnerable moments of his life. The NHS is trying to persuade former clinicians to return to the profession. What would it take to persuade you to swap your pen for a stethoscope? If offered, would you accept the position of secretary of state for health in the new prime minister’s cabinet?It’s a very big question, and it’s a bigger question than ever. When I left medicine, I was the first or second person in my cohort of hundreds to leave. And these days, I can’t think of the last time I spoke to a doctor who wasn’t talking about their plan B, whether that was going part-time or moving to another country or working in a different industry entirely. But all I’ll say is, being a doctor is an amazing, brilliant, precious career. But if you’re struggling, and if you’re not enjoying it, you can’t do the best for your patients. And there are lots of people who say, “Oh, you must stay in the job no matter what”, and that’s unhealthy and unhelpful. Just work out what it is you want to do. On a more serious note, he reveals that the point where Whishaw as Adam goes infront of the General Medical Council and quotes the statistic that one doctor every three weeks in the UK takes their life, he is using Kay’s exact words. He didn’t want to be a doctor, but he became one. He didn’t want to be a straight married man, but he became one: he married a woman. He plotted adultery – he took a comedy gig in New Zealand so he could go to a gay sauna – and was raped there. He developed bulimia after a fellow doctor – a psychiatrist no less – called him “a big lad” when they slept together.

Write down what it is you want to do at the bottom of a piece of paper, and then see if you can work on what the steps are to getting there. It’s a major roll of the dice asking for medical advice, I’ve been out of the game a long time. All you would get are half-remembered semi-facts. And people are always disappointed when they ask about Ben Whishaw because he’s such a lovely man I can’t offer anything approaching a juicy anecdote. You’re made health secretary tomorrow. Truss won’t give you any more money. What’s the very first thing you will do?Ben Whishaw as Adam, with Ambika Mod as Shruti in the BBC drama This Is Going to Hurt. Photograph: Anika Molnar/BBC/Sister/AMC When I was writing her dialogue, I had Harriet Walter in my head. I didn’t actually think that Harriet would say yes, because she’s Dame Harriet Walter!’ He’s a proper national treasure. There are millions of people who now presumably think that I look like Ben Whishaw too, and I’m absolutely happy with that!’ he laughs. I’ve had a bunch of messages from people who said, “I’ve read that book and now I feel empowered to press the ‘f**k it’ button”, to do the thing to blow up their life and leave the thing in their world that isn’t working for them,’ he told Metro.co.uk.

The most distressing part of the book is his description of being raped in a sauna in New Zealand. He cut this episode out “about 20 times” before steeling himself to go ahead with it. The clincher, once again, was the hope that including it might help others to seek help. He puts his head briefly in his hands. “I know it will cause me grief in all sorts of ways. I know what social media is like, I know I’m going to have to answer questions about it for ever. But I was writing a book about being honest … Time will tell if it was the right decision.” I knew in advance that Adam Kay might seem shy. In the new book, he writes: “Elton John was wrong about sorry being the hardest word – for me, it was ‘hello’. “How are you doing?” he asks hastily, as if wishing to skip the introduction altogether. He is 42 with an intelligent face and toffee-brown eyes with a dogged, anxious expression – he looks like a rather stressed cherub. He is immediately funny but it is not clear to what extent he amuses himself. He wears a T-shirt the colour of raspberry sorbet upon which is flirtatiously written, Not from Paris, Madame. He is from Brighton, born into a Polish Jewish family of medics (original name Strykowski) and grew up in London. And although he returned home on a delayed flight from Edinburgh at 3am (he has been trying out material there for a new touring show to be called: This is Going to Hurt … More), he shows no sign of fatigue. An old hand at sleeplessness, he denies himself coffee (explaining he has just given up caffeine). There are plenty of obvious adjectives one might apply to Adam Kay – clever, entertaining, articulate – but, as I listen, the one that keeps resurfacing is vulnerable. I wrote it as a one and done, a beginning and a middle and an end, and I wrote it with that as a hard ending. I didn’t want to do a second series for the sake of just because. There seemed to be a clear appetite for more, which was hugely flattering, but I had been thinking about this series for so long, for years and years, that I didn’t want to then rush out another one a year later.’ I think if I hadn’t done medicine, I’d probably have been a musician. Medicine insists that you have all these extracurricular interests and for me, that was mostly music and I really loved music. I wonder if I’d be writing for the piano right now, writing dots rather than writing words.’ You excellently highlighted the toll taken on the mental health of staff given the job pressures. What changes would you want to see that will have an impact on improving staff mental health and make them feel safe to report problems?And things are now better – they are not better enough, there’s still a long way to go – but it’s a big ship to steer.’ Kay is known for being active on social media and remains a big supporter of the NHS and its staff. THIS IS GOING TO HURT was the bestselling non-fiction book of the century – a frank, funny and furious look at the brutal realities of life in the NHS. It opens with a nightmare: his recurring nightmare of a baby he cannot save. But that is only the first of his agonies. His prat falling is vast in its scope, the self-destruction of an artist. You have been criticised for misogyny, particularly in the descriptions of women’s bodies, at the vulnerable time that is pregnancy and childbirth. What are your thoughts on this?