There are now more doctors on television than there are in the NHS. I don't mean the oleaginous real ones holding the early-morning thrush clinic on breakfast TV (been there, done that), but the fictional ones. Medical dramas have long reached saturation point, so doctors are spilling into crime. In a recent episode of Waking the Dead, one doctor slaughtered an entire family so he could get reinstated on the medical register (a bizarre tactic that fooled even the GMC). Post-Shipman, doctors are so often the bad guys that any idiot could spot the murderer in BBC1's Messiah after five minutes. And I dread to think what Hannibal Lecter has done for recruitment into psychiatry.
Dr Lecter is a brilliant comic creation who wouldn't look out of place in Channel 4's much-lauded Green Wing. Indeed, hospital-based comedies now seem to be nudging dramas as the most popular way to spin healthcare. TLC, Scrubs, Doctors and Nurses and now Green Wing have ploughed different parts of the same furrow with varying results, but the attraction of medicine for comedy remains as constant as ever.
Why? Comedy generally requires a degree of entrapment, and you can't get more hierarchical than the medical profession and the NHS. Whatever level you're on, you're likely to be out of control, and not able to do your job properly, but not able to give it up. A friend of mine who has sacrificed his life, marriage and a substantial portion of his liver for his work (coincidentally, as a liver specialist) said he felt like he was in a salmon trap. He had invested so much time and effort swimming upstream that he couldn't chuck it all in and turn around even if he had wanted to.
The NHS is also an extraordinarily unhealthy place to work or be sick in. We damage 10% of the patients and staff each year, not least by the pressure of expectation. Idiot politicians promise to save the NHS in time for the next election; patients want gods and angels armed with miracle cures and the media is forever exposing us. Doctors have become like neutered magicians, with all our tricks explained.
Doctors like to think that we rise above all this with a razor-sharp wit worthy of any TV comedy, but as anyone who has sat through a medical revue knows, medics are much funnier to laugh at, than with. Traditional medical humour (Back Passage to India, Flush Gordon, On Her Majesty's Secret Cervix) doesn't translate well to a public stage. But the lasting impression of anyone brave enough to stay until the end is the bizarre range of disordered personalities in the cast.
This is where medicine really comes into its own as a source of comedy. Doctors were traditionally selected on academic ability alone - three grade A science A-levels and the communication skills of a dead skunk. As students, the first patient we met was a dead one (start as you mean to go on), whom we hacked into ever-decreasing pieces. And if we survived our undergraduate years with any sympathy intact, one year as a junior doctor was sure to beat it out of you. I'm not saying we are all psychopaths, but most of us have deep conflicts about how much we really enjoy the job and whether we like people quite as much as we're supposed to. As one consultant radiologist put it in the medical magazine Hospital Doctor:
"There are a substantial number of patients out there who are utterly execrable ... they are, in the main, at worst trivially unwell. They need no attention (apart from a good slapping) but insist on being seen. I can only imagine the horror of seeing a waiting room filled with these churls and ingrates all bleating louder than sheep, knowing that there is damn-all wrong with them . . . I have a mental image of revenge - turning to a most loathsome specimen, smiling thinly while declaring: 'You've got cancer, you bastard - die soon.'"
Such extreme views are a merciful rarity but hospitals remain the commonest situation for TV comedy, not just because of the inexhaustibility of the storylines, but because of the sheer range and peculiarity of the characters. This is what Green Wing has spotted. The hour flies by with very little story, but you don't mind when the characters are so memorable. You wouldn't want to meet them on the eve of your prostate surgery but believe me, they're out there.
· Phil Hammond is a GP and writer who co-wrote the BBC1 comedy series Doctors and Nurses, broadcast earlier this year
