There is an emphasis on wellbeing in hospitals but when you dig into it, it often just amounts to a Zumba class. A recent report published by the GMC intended to improve support for the mental health of doctors but its recommendations were not taken on board by the government. People have a huge problem with seeking help. There is always the feeling that if you speak to someone, word will get out. There needs to be a culture, in medicine, that is less militaristic where people can talk openly. Juniors should be able to tell their bosses when they’re struggling, bosses should actively look out for their juniors. All staff should know where they can turn and trust they can get help that will not compromise their careers (at the moment, you are almost taught that doctors should not struggle). 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. 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.’ Now I understand him better, I understand his cruelty. He never extended kindness to himself. This book is breathtakingly sad, and I suspect that will anger him, too.

Adam Kay is busy man, fresh off the triumph of his bestselling book, Undoctored, his new memoir all about what happened after he hung up his scrubs as a medic and made a go of his comedy career. 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. Which do you prefer: people asking you for medical advice at parties, or people recognising you and asking you about Ben Whishaw?

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? 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.

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.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.’ 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.’ 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. 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.’ 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!’

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. 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.’ 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? 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. 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.There is no shame in having put in your hours and your years and then going off to something else. Because medicine isn’t your defining characteristic as a as a person, it’s your job and you can’t let it destroy you.’ It wasn’t censored. More than one channel wanted to show it, and the BBC said to me, if you work with us – who I really wanted to work with anyway because there’s a lot of similarities between the NHS and the BBC, these big, wonderful, but imperfect institutions – we will never once tell you don’t do that. And true enough, no-one never said that. But it is quite a different thing to the book, and that was quite deliberate because it’s quite a difficult book to adapt.