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 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? When secondary school came around, I became a wide-eyed, wide-beaked gosling, force-fed the corn that would eventually lead to its starring role in a foie gras starter. My evenings, weekends and holidays were stuffed with exam revision, interview practice, work experience and med-school-mandated extra-curricular activities. There definitely wasn't any time for spare socialising. [...] Sometimes, the loneliest feelings of all don't come from total isolation but from being on the edge of the cword, watching the rest of the world live its life, as if it's happening on television and not three feet away from you in the canteen. But I told myself that maybe this was just what adulthood was like sometimes. 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. Despite being in the same profession, I was traumatised by your description of a young man whose penis was degloved after he slid down a lamp-post. Did you go too far? How do you manage to draw the line between comedy and tragedy in your work?

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 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.’ Adam Kay is witty and has a dry sense of humour that some people will love or hate. I personally enjoyed Undoctored for his charismatic uptake on difficult times that you’d never expect anyone to take the time to flesh out into writing. He does give us an insight to his life, his new relationship and how he is truly coping with his new lease of life. I quite appreciated Kay’s frankness- there is no sugar coating by all means. He puts it plain and simple and issues us with stark warnings about the process of diving into a new career path when the other one mentally and physically depleted him.

Who is in the cast of Adam Kay: Undoctored - This Is Going to Hurt… More?

Coming out to his family (I was confused about this because I thought he had already come out and that H, his partner from This Is Going to Hurt was a man, I think I probably got the TV show mixed up) With the NHS brought to its knees during the Covid pandemic, could we look to other health systems around the world for inspiration?

A favourite passage, about going through his stuff in his parents' attic and finding his half-skeleton from medical school: 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? I just started work in foundation year 1 and didn’t realise it would be this brutal. I’ve been a doctor for about a week-and-a-half and have already worked 120 hours, told someone’s family that their relative is going to die soon, verified two deaths and cried on the way home more times than not. I know you eventually left medicine, but does this next bit get any easier? Also, any tips for getting out of medicine? Undoctored is Adam Kay’s funniest and most moving book yet – an astonishing portrait of a life in and out of medicine, from one of Britain’s finest storytellers, and is now coming to the West End stage in an extraordinary new show. 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.

Speaking of extracurriculars, medicine really is all about privilege. I know I wouldn't have made my way here without all the private classes my parents were able to afford. But, much like Adam, I can't help feeling a tiny bit defensive. 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.’ Zacznijmy (a właściwie prawie skończmy) od tego, że w ogóle każdy człowiek, ale… „każdy lekarz ma jakieś dziwactwa…”

Ben Whishaw as Adam, with Ambika Mod as Shruti in the BBC drama This Is Going to Hurt. Photograph: Anika Molnar/BBC/Sister/AMC I read Adam’s previous two books: The first as a medical student on the verge of graduation, the second as a medical intern and now I am reading his third book as a resident and it certainly hit closest to home. You’re made health secretary tomorrow. Truss won’t give you any more money. What’s the very first thing you will do?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. 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 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.” 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. Speaking of Whishaw, Kay is of course a fan of the actor cast to play the fictionalised version of Adam (who the author reminds us isn’t really him).