How Phil Hammond mixes medicine and comedy

The worlds of medicine and comedy have long been linked. Not just in the 'doctor, doctor' joke or the tedious parade of scatological and gynecological gags that make up your average medics' revue, but in an impressive list of performers who have made the jump from med school to comedy, thats include the likes of Graham Chapman, Jonathan Miller and Harry Hill.

More recently, Phil Hammond, a former GP and sexual health specialist, has joined their ranks - but, unusually, he's carving a niche out for himself by actually using his medical knowledge in his act.

And now, this stand-up, writer and broadcaster, can add 'actor' to his diverse CV, after taking a small role in Doctors And Nurses, the new BBC ONE sitcom he co-writote.

"I got the part because we wanted an arrogant, posh idiot and, for some reason, I seemed to fit the bill," he says.

"I was also very cheap and it was only for one scene so I'd need to be really bad to ruin it. From a writer's perspective, I wanted the insight of rehearsing with the cast and feeling the pressure on recording day."

Phil is used to being on stage in front of an audience, having completed his first solo stand-up tour,89 Minutes To Save The NHS, last year, but TV is a different beast.

"It was much harder than being on stage," he says. "There are lots of tricks to screen acting, like cheating your eye-line so you get more of your face in shot, and keeping movements to a minimum as they are greatly exaggerated.

"Unfortunately, no one told me this until afterwards, so all you get is my ugly profile thrashing about like a grounded mackerel. But at least I didn't upstage the star."

Phil was invited to co-write Doctors And Nurses by Nigel Smith, a writer new to TV - aside from contributing sketches to the short-lived TV To Go.

Nigel had the idea for the sitcom but soon realised he had a problem. "It soon became apparent that I ran a terrible risk of making a complete fool of myself if I got the details of the working practices of a hospital wrong," he says.

"The choice was simple: either spend years learning one end of a catheter from another or ask someone else to help with that and stick to writing jokes. Ten seconds later, I rang the country's foremost medical humorist to ask him to join me. Unfortunately, he wasn't available so I asked Phil."

Phil was quick to agree. "The sitcom offered the chance to bring to life issues I care passionately about in a fictional hospital with fictional characters; much safer than investigative journalism and a lot more constructive, too."

But Writing Doctors And Nurses didn't come easy. "Nigel encouraged me to keep writing sketch comedy and stand-up, and we developed a Radio 4 series, 28 Minutes To Save The NHS. I subsequently took it as one-man show to Edinburgh, and on a 60-date UK tour. The tour gave me a much clearer idea about what material would work best with a public audience, but sitcom is much harder to master than stand-up and my first attempts floundered.

"Writing a sitcom requires you to go over and over it until you get it as good as it can possibly be ­ it's a bit like starting with a heart transplant, then changing your mind, doing bowel surgery, whipping out the gall-bladder, putting it back in again and then deciding you've got the wrong patient and starting again on someone else."

Doctors And Nurses centres on the dependent relationship between two surgeons on the Isle of Wight: the idealistic Dr Roy Glover, played by Adrian Edmondson (whose Young Ones character Vyvyan was a medical student) and the talented, cynical and wealthy George Banatawala (Madhav Sharma).

"Theirs is a symbiotic love-hate relationship," says Phil. "Roy likes being a big fish in a small pool, and is too frightened to leave. George would love to, but no-one will have him."

"The characters are clearly defined and different, and above all, real. Doctors have never been gods and nurses aren't super-human machines.

"Much of the power of medicine comes from this cosy belief that doctors are shining knights with magic bullets who can save us all from prolonged suffering and premature death," says Phil: "True, we can do some great things, but often we just obscure the inevitability of death. So let's not expect too much of the NHS. The staff are human and all of us are fallible."

First published:January 12, 2004

Published: 22 Mar 2009