Adam Kay writing Med School series for Netflix
- This Is Going To Hurt creator Adam Kay is developing a comedy drama for Netflix based upon his medical school experiences
- With the working title Med School, the show is being made by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's production company Various Artists Ltd
- Kay has also cast doubt on This Is Going To Hurt returning to BBC One for a second series
Adam Kay is developing a Netflix comedy drama based on his medical school experiences, British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal.
With the working title Med School, BCG understands that a writing room for the project has been convened by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's production company Various Artists Ltd (Dead Pixels, Sally4Ever).
A Netflix spokesperson confirmed that the show is in the works but has yet to be greenlit.
Musical comedian and writer Kay enjoyed massive success with his 2017 memoir This Is Going To Hurt, based on his diaries as a junior doctor between 2004 and 2010. Selling more than 2.5million copies, it was adapted into a BBC One series earlier this year starring Ben Whishaw and stand-up Ambika Mod.
Kay's latest memoir, Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients, published last month, recalls his medical school training at Imperial College London. The book opens with a brutal account of new students dissecting a human body, while "learning to fold and pack away our most human feelings".
Scathing of the mental health care afforded to them, the memoir recounts "teaching by humiliation. Teaching by bullying. That's just how it is in medicine, and how it's always been". Kay also recalls instances of racism and sexism by his superiors in an environment where there was no opportunity to stand up to them.
Students were encouraged to embrace a culture of excessive drinking and to cultivate a dark sense of humour by joining revues he said. Kay began performing such shows in 1998 and formed the musical comedy duo Amateur Transplants with fellow student Suman Biswas, taking several shows to the Edinburgh Fringe before he went solo.
"My first week at medical school, for some reason, the way you learn anatomy, certainly when I was there, was by cutting up a cadaver, a human body" Kay told Dr Alex George on his Stompcast podcast last month. "It's been shown to not be the best way to teach someone anatomy but it's tradition" he noted, with George confirming that the training has since moved on to more enlightened techniques.
Kay, however, was "an idiot 18-year-old, just left home, with a scalpel cutting through human flesh. And that was hugely traumatising.
"But what I did afterwards, the medical school sanctioned thing, was off down the medical school bar, which was literally inside the hospital. And that becomes your normal. That's what you're taught. I'm not a puritan. I'm not saying we shouldn't allow people to blow off steam and unwind. But at the same time, if that is pretty much the only thing that you're told ... that's a difficult one to shake.
"Likewise, my humour, I've always been a class clown to some extent. Humour was something we were encouraged to do. It's potentially why there were so many people in comedy, there's this enormous tradition of comedians who used to be doctors, from Monty Python to Harry Hill and many inbetween.
"The other thing the book does is look back to medical school and ask how it affected me and how I've become. I'm very bad at asking for help."
Elsewhere in Undoctored, Kay shares the trauma of losing a baby with his then wife, discloses that he was raped in a gay sauna in New Zealand and opens up about struggling with an eating disorder.
Currently touring his live show This Is Going To Hurt... More around the UK, incorporating several stories from Undoctored, Kay has cast doubt on This Is Going To Hurt returning to television.
"I wrote This Is Going To Hurt with a beginning, middle and end" he wrote, in response to a reader question in an Observer Q & A last month. "I wanted it to be about the mental health of healthcare staff. I did what I set out to do and made a taboo subject an unmissable conversation. I have no plans for a second series, I'd hate to do one for the sake of it.
"But I am in the early stages of a new project which will hopefully become something, and, if it does, will be very different but, hopefully, people will watch it."