Somerset Maugham: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Cheers, John! What is the best writing advice you have heard? I trundled over, expectations set fairly low, and it was some kind of incredible waterside tropical garden paradise. Not per se, but I was on holiday in Cornwall recently and read that a churchyard in a nearby and unlikely-sounding village called St Just-in-Roseland had been described by John Betjeman as “the most beautiful churchyard on earth”.

Have you ever gone on a literary pilgrimage? I don’t think either the NHS or the BBC have ever been in more peril. In retrospect, those were the “good old days”. Having had a foot in each camp, how do you feel about it? To an outsider now, it seems so much worse. I interviewed the psychiatrist Anthony Clare in the 1990s and he was lamenting the decline of the BBC and the NHS under Tory rule. I don’t know where my fairly GSOH comes from, but it’s probably an amalgam of Jewish tradition, medical tradition and being the class clown. If it asks a question, then I suppose it’s: how does medicine mess you up? There is a strong if diverse tradition of Jewish humour, from the Torah to the Diaspora. It’s both a prequel and a sequel to This is Going to Hurt: looking back at my time at medical school and what happened after I left medicine.

What can we expect from your new memoir, Undoctored? I major on the funny, but sneak in the politics the same rationale as dicing a carrot finely enough that a toddler doesn’t notice. I suspect if I’d called it “A Harrowing Polemic about the NHS” it might not have been a bestselling debut. It is sold as a funny book, which it is, but it asks a serious question: how compatible is it to be a doctor and a human? Tell me more. You describe your bestselling debut, This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor, as a slight confidence trick.

Dr adam kay this is going to hurt