Adam Kay: How to Be a Bogus Doctor

Can't quite get the pulse racing

★★★
comedy review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes
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Published 07 Aug 2013
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Spending any length of time in a medical scenario is an onerous, unappealing prospect, be it a doctor's waiting room or in A&E. Even Adam Kay's premise of churning out freshly trained quacks to take advantage of an NHS in crisis was going to be hard pushed not to press the buttons of the squeamish – especially "in a Portakabin set to the temperature of Jupiter."

As much as there are inevitable recoils at the functioning bodily humour, there are belly laughs across a show that has a steady bedside manner. Kay takes us through four modules that are designed to turn us into mercenary medics, with short cuts that include using a vacuum cleaner to fashion a dialysis machine. Meanwhile, don't expect to defibrillate and have toast...

From the correct font to use for a forged medical certificate to disposing of dead patients; it's all here. Kay ticks every box available to squeeze the marrow out of medical mirth. It can feel a little systematic, an A-Z of medical miscellany, and the unchanging tone of Kay, a former doctor and writer for Phil Hammond (the daddy of the medicine as mirth genre), means a steady pulse for the show throughout, and therefore nothing to get ours exactly racing. You can't get struck off for consistency, of course, but it's symbolic that Kay himself likens a healthy pulse to the theme tune of The Archers; steady, safe and not quite unmissable.