Dr Ranj Singh: “I Was Outed To My Parents”

0:02This is a global production. I haven't told many people this. I was outed to my parents. I didn't know that. And I was outed by my in-laws. You were expecting, I would imagine, some upset or rejection, particularly from family. Absolutely. I didn't grow up in a world where you could be anything other than heterosexual. when a patient on your list dies it shouldn't come as a oh that's one less person that I've got to worry about don't you ever feel guilty that you make way more money than real doctors this isn't what I signed up for

0:44Dr Ranj Singh doctor, author, award winning television presenter, strictly come dancing legend, best known perhaps for making health and well being accessible to audiences of all ages, particularly the younger age. And I think I can say with some confidence that something of a superstar among the younger generation, because I saw you at the theatre once being mobbed by junior audience members, and you handled it very, very graciously. In fact, I'd go so far as to say you seem to be enjoying it. I love performing. I love performing for kids and young people. Well, my job is kind of like a performance, isn't it?

1:21I get several hats to put on. And, yeah, if I've made someone's day a little bit better, then so be it. You've suspended temporarily your practicing license, but I still call you Dr. Ranj soon because this is, or Dr. Ranj, of course, as you're better known, because this is, you know, certainly not a hanging up of the stethoscope. Absolutely not. So a couple of years ago, I decided that I was going to take a little sidestep from clinical medicine. So for context, I've been working in the NHS for over 20 years and it has changed significantly in that amount of time. And I got my dream job. I'm a consultant paediatrician in A &E in London.

2:01And after a few years of doing that, after the pandemic particularly, I thought, you know what, I need to sidestep. I need a little and I need a new challenge. And I also for my mental well-being, I think needed something different to do for a bit. um so i've just suspend well put my license to practice on pause i'm still registered and um pursued some other projects and my my whole thing was um i'm chasing joy that's what i want to do whilst i still can the pandemic taught me a lot of things and taught all of us a lot of things that we it taught us a lot about our mortality i think um so you're kind of coming from that we've only got one life point of view absolutely and I want to do as much with it whilst I still can um and that's why I sort of did that sidestep I thought right time time to chase some dreams tell me we'll get to the dreams but tell me first about the first morning you woke up without the shift in the diary it was I had this weird combination of relief for want of a better word but also a sense of loss medicine is my passion it really is it's my day job it's what I'm built to do and it's very much a core part of me but stepping to one side took a lot of I suppose courage because medics in this country you are basically it's beaten into you that this is your lifeblood this is everything you do and this is why our nhs survives it's because people who work in it give so much of themselves it is a part of you you know you go above and beyond and people say that all the time but that's why it survives people go above and beyond and i just i think i'd run out of stuff in my bucket to give and i needed to recuperate from it but losing that felt a bit it felt odd it did feel any guilt yeah yeah because we're made i mean we're made to feel guilty if we go off sick sure because because that's how we treat healthcare professionals in this country you cannot be fallible you have to be you know bulletproof and you have to be there you have to be giving of you how dare you step away and do anything else even or be in your own time um so yeah i did feel a bit of that but actually now that i'm a couple of years down the line it's probably the best thing i ever did because now i'm more useful in other ways to people okay and my job isn't to be a doctor just to be a doctor my job is to make people feel better no matter how that happens.

4:48That's how I like to think. It's suiting you, this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I still, I do research now in the NHS. So we're looking at using AI to help us treat people better because AI gets used for all sorts of other stuff. But we're trying to use it for something good. So I'm doing research and then, you know, I've been doing writing books. I've been chasing dreams in musical theatre. I've been pursuing a bit more acting, a bit more TV stuff. I thought, do you know what? We get one life. we've got one chance I could get hit by a bus tomorrow or I could get cancer and I do not want to be on my deathbed and think I wish I had tried that's where I'm coming from so I'm happy to try it doesn't mean it's going to work but hey it's funny isn't it you've talked a lot about your life in your childhood and you could easily have ended up living your life on rails couldn't you yeah you could have i mean expectations of you that you spent i think the first 18 years of your life really straining to meet at every turn yeah so i'm from an uh indian immigrant background my parents moved to the uk just after they got married when they were 21 spent some time in the midlands then settled in kent um i grew up in a traditional indian household very working class very proud of that um and it was always instilled into me that you have to have a career i'm so glad that was instilled into me um because i've used that as a springboard that has always been my sort of safety net having a career and i and i wanted to because i wanted to i loved learning i wanted to help people i wanted to do something um but those values were always instilled in how do they do that how do mom and dad do that how do they instill those values in you because i don't want to use the wrong word but i think you've described their jobs as as essentially unskilled yes they worked incredibly hard to provide the best for you and your brothers but how do they go from working in in unskilled labor to impressing upon that only the very next generation upon their own children how important it is to pursue a professional career well they only got to get an education to a certain level um so essentially when they moved to the uk they had nothing they had nothing financially they had very little but also skill set wise they didn't have much that was transferable so they worked in manual professions and i'm so proud of what they it's incredible isn't it because not only did they have to get to grips with a new language a new culture a new environment new jobs i mean i can't imagine most of us doing that these days um so what they did was not just brave it was it was incredible and i take a lot of inspiration from that but they always wanted me and my two brothers to make the most of our lives they didn't necessarily push us down any particular direction they just wanted us to get an education get a career make the most of your life and your opportunities because we didn't get to do that how did they keep your Indian heritage alive while you were growing up in um in in Medway yeah um well our lives were pretty much embroiled in the culture so we had a you know we were part of an indian community we spoke punjabi at home i got my first gcse at the age of eight i love this story i want to build up to it okay sorry i'm joking but you did you had to do it at sunday school i think yes we used to go to school on sunday we used to go to punjabi school on sundays because my parents wanted us to be able to read and write and speak it and i learned that very quickly and and i hated school because no kid really likes school at that age but the proviso was that you can leave and you don't have to go once you've got your gcse so in my parents minds they were like good we've got a good seven or eight years to go yet i took that challenge head on and i think i've kept that mentality through my entire life whenever someone says gives me a challenge or says you can't do something i come back and say here you go and that's what i did i i took my exams i did you arrange it all yourself no no no it's all done through the sunday school okay so you went up to the teacher at sunday school and said i'd like to take my gcc six years early they kind of said are you ready what sort of shifts were you putting in what sort of homework were you doing well it was a few hours every sunday and then you get a bit of homework as well and they said well i think you're good enough to to take the exam um so i did and um i passed i got a c um and then i took it into my school my primary primary school took it to the headmaster i was naff at sport and how old were you know eight nine ten i was eight eight years old yeah i wasn't very good at sport so i never got sports certificates in assemblies i used to watch all my mates getting swimming badges and things like that so the first certificate i ever got i took it in to my headmaster um and i said would you do that thing that you do in assembly like you like do the presentation of a certificate and he said i remember him saying to me do you know what this is and i was like i've got absolutely no idea it's like i've done an exam basically and i've and i've got this certificate and he got some other teachers and he goes he goes this is a gcse o level which is what they were called at that in that time um yeah of course they were because You'd have sat GCSEs just looking at your age.

10:13When you were 16, you sat GCSEs. But when you were eight, they were still O-levels. We were talking, well, I was born in 79. So I was, what was it, 1986, 87-ish? Yeah, so that's... Must be some sort of record. I don't know about that. But I was certainly, it was a proud moment. What did you like about primary school? What did I like? Okay, I'm going to be controversial. Everyone thinks, oh, of course he's an academic. Of course, he loves science and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, great. I did. Science and tech, great. I loved the arts. The first thing I was ever told I was good at was when I was six, my second year of primary school teacher, Mrs.

10:54Page, Lorraine Page, no relationship to Elaine, said to me, you can sing. She said, you have a talent for music and a talent for art was the other thing. And she was the one that really nurtured it. And ironically, about 30 years later, she came to see me in Panto in Canterbury, my very first Panto. And she brought my school reports with her. She'd photocopied them. And she still had them. And she brought them with her. Like, I mean, 30 years later, that was absolutely nuts. Maybe even longer than 30 years later, actually, it would have been almost 40. But the fact that she kept them really meant a lot to me.

11:34the fact that I credit her with my creativity. I credit her with making me explore that side of myself. When do you think or when did you notice that perhaps you'd already overtaken your parents, educationally speaking, given what you said about their own experience? I see what you mean. Yeah, maybe when I was a teenager, I think, I thought I couldn't ask my parents for help with homework. Right, that's the kind of thing I mean. I think that's the thing that it didn't, And it made me feel a bit sad, actually, because I had all these friends who could, like if they were struggling with algebra or if they were, you know, struggling with some sort of geography or science or whatever, they could ask their parents.

12:18And I remember being acutely aware of not being able to do that when I was growing up as a teenager. But do you know what I could do? I could go to my local library. My parents had instilled into us from a young age, we would go to our local library every week. and that's why I'm so passionate about libraries still because they offer access to kids who you wouldn't realise don't have those resources. Yeah, I mean it's interesting because your new book, The Human Body Encyclopedia, Dr. Ranj's Human Body Encyclopedia, when I first saw it, it struck me as very much the kind of book you would encounter in the children's section of a library.

12:54It would be one of the ones that the kids were fighting over or that was on the table because the way it's put together, the way that it's written, the way that it looks, it's a very visual volume is is is very much of that tradition isn't it you might be able to find a lot of the stuff in it on the internet but you wouldn't it wouldn't land with you in the same way that's exactly it i wanted it to capture kids imagination it's my 10th book and i mainly write for kids and young people to make their lives better in some way so i've done like sort of grown-up guides and you know guides to being yourself and this is a guy everything of yourself and I want every child to be able to pick it up and see themselves in it, which is why the illustrations are deliberately diverse.

13:34Deliberately. Because I'm not being, for want of a better word, woke. There are many, many better words than woke. But what I'm trying to do is have any child be able to pick up that book, no matter what their ability is, no matter what their background is or what they look like, who they are, to pick it up and say, oh, this applies to me as well. You can't be what you can't see. Yeah, yeah. Or sometimes you have to be what you can't see. Yeah, of course. But that's just a tougher journey. Well, speaking of that, when did you first become aware of potential negatives to your ethnicity, to your background?

14:09Oh, gosh. When I was a kid, I'm talking primary school again, at that age. And I remember going to my teacher and saying, and I'm going to use a word here that isn't very complimentary. And I use it very carefully and mindfully. I said to my teacher, what's a ****? And my teacher said, she expressed two things. Firstly, she said, it's not a very nice word. Do not use that word. But secondly, she said, I'm so glad you don't know what that is. And it was another child that had used it. And it made me aware of being different. That was the first time I think I looked and I thought, he's called me that because of what I look like.

14:53And that was when I think the very first, I still remember that. it's so weird i still remember that i'm so glad my teacher had that reaction to it um but this was the 80s we were growing up in a very different in a working class community as well and very different world to now uh in many ways although saying that you know i worry that things might swing by yeah or already are swinging a bit in some some areas that you where you describe it there it feels almost like a loss of innocence you know that that sense of not even thinking about these things until suddenly you're presented with um and demand that you do i think it was my one of my first experiences of being othered and i've been othered in so many ways and many people are many people who listen to you can be othered for your background your ethnicity your gender your sexuality um you know where you grew up uh where you're from and i've experienced i can tick a lot of those boxes so i know what it means to be othered but you know what the best part of it if i can say there's a best part is i know the importance of belonging and that's what i want people to feel belong that you belong somewhere that there is someone there for you even in the most horrible times and situations i want you to belong to something did you i didn't completely i I have all these intersections.

16:19I'm working class. I'm a person of colour. I'm Indian. I'm a second generation immigrant. I'm queer. And I say that now because that's probably the latest realisation I've had. You still said it last. I still said it last. Probably because it's the one that wasn't given to me freely. Okay. I had to get there. But it's probably the most important. So all of these intersections, I know what it feels like to not belong.

17:01You obviously developed this impulse to help and protect. That must have been sooner. I know you talked about getting to university and deciding that you didn't want to be anymore the chap who got his head kicked in for trying to protect his friends in secondary school. So there must have been something there that felt protective of others. Yeah, because it was it came from a protection of self. Yeah, because I didn't realize this at the time I grew up. I and not through any intention of anybody else. I don't think I had many of my emotional needs met. So I had to be my own emotional protector.

17:43And I developed an internal guardian. And this is a recent realisation of that. So I have a character inside me who protects me.

18:00And I've had to have conversations with this character recently because his protection has probably been overreaching. And affects other areas of your life. But that protection, that feeling of safety and security, that I developed as a kid that I needed to be my own. And then I realized how important that was that I needed to be it for somebody else. And I think it's sad and remarkable that children can think like that. We forget how emotionally intelligent children can be. But yeah, I developed this protector. But a positive protector? Yes. Well, you're quite lucky. Positive as a child, but many psychologists and counsellors will say that the protective mechanisms we often put in place when we're children can become counterproductive when we're older.

18:49Yeah, that's what I was clarifying. As I've got older, it's become slightly counterproductive because it means that it's important to be able to be vulnerable, especially with those you love. And if that protective mechanism gets in the way, sometimes you have to have a word with it. And I've had words with him. It's funny, you know, I've had this conversation with a few people, including myself, and it's often a boarding school upbringing that creates this internal protector. And you don't know or an inauthentic self or hypervigilance. I mean, there's all sorts of words to describe it. But you describe it as springing from not having your emotional needs met, which is more likely to happen at boarding school.

19:29But this is just because mum and dad were so busy. We all develop survival mechanisms that we need. And I think it was part that mum and dad didn't recognise how emotionally astute I was as a kid sometimes. And were your brothers a little bit more? They were a bit more, yeah. A bit of knockabout. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I understand. I think I was a very creative child who was surrounded by people who didn't always recognise how much there was in there and how much I wanted to get out. Except Mrs. Page. Except Mrs. Page. and I thank her for doing that because she was a bit of a lifeline in many ways for my creativity.

20:05Mum and dad were fantastic in so many ways but they were not trained to recognise that side of me. You might as well have gone out and started speaking Mandarin. Right, exactly. So yeah, we develop survival mechanisms, don't we? And then those survival mechanisms sometimes get in the way when we're older. Exactly that, exactly that. And I mean, we should give credit where it's due before we move on. I mean, you were very good at singing in the choir, you'd run her up at the Kemp Music Festival. This wasn't just a sort of sideline. This, as you say, and as you've subsequently discovered, and as indeed this sidestep is designed to address, this is in your bones.

20:42Yeah, yeah. It's part of my joy. It brings, it feeds my soul. And if we can, that's a very privileged position to be in, I think, but if you can, do stuff that feeds your soul. Right now, especially. Can't argue with that. Because everything in the world tries to take away from it. So where did the road fall, Orange? Where did it become necessary to decide what you were going to pursue? So I ticked all my boxes. I, you know, got through school. I got the grades to get into university, went to medical school for six years. When did you first frame the ambition to be a doctor? Oh, I was probably about nine, ten-ish.

21:22So there is a duality here, isn't there? I mean, there's a contrast between individuality and duty. That was at your heart growing up. And now there's a contrast between science and arts, between creativity and academia, which are not the same thing. But you also loved and still love, as the new book makes crystal clear and a lot of your other work does as well, you want to know how things work. Yeah, absolutely. Curiosity. I think it was around probably coming up to the 11 plus when it existed back in the day for those of us out there who recognize that in those times. You had to kind of start making decisions.

21:58You had to kind of think about your future. And I medicine was the perfect marriage of scientific curiosity and that want need to help people. and it and my parents obviously loved that because you know to them to to an asian sort of you know mentality being a doctor dentist lawyer accountant whatever it might be engineer professions like that were you know look they were aspirations and so they were really happy that that's what i wanted to go for i didn't think i was clever enough let's if i'm perfectly honest when i was in secondary school i remember sitting sats and thinking i i can't do this i'm just not i'm just not good enough and i spoke to my local pharmacist who was part of our community an asian man mr mangle um and he said to me and i said look i think i might i might see if i can become a pharmacist and he was like well do you want to be a pharmacist i was actually i want to be a doctor and i'm not being disrespectful to pharmacists all because my cousin's a pharmacist um and he said well i was but i was like but i don't think i'm clever enough i think pharmacists are on equal paths by the way just fyi um but as in a child's mind i was like i don't think i'm clever enough to be a doctor and he said why don't you just try like give it your best shot even if you don't get it you're going to be in a better position than you are aren't you then you can have a look at something else if you don't get there and i was like someone's just set me a challenge very solid advice as well i hope you put a lot of businesses away later this i find this a little confusing um just from from my very personal perspective because so much when we look at these um infernal comparisons of how different ethnicities perform and different socioeconomic groups perform academically where where does the plausibility and the feasibility of you becoming a doctor as the son of factory workers come from because there will be other families and other communities where you would be told that that's not for the likes of us yeah it's i think it's a it generally is uh the mentality you have in immigrant communities anyway because you just want to do better you want to you want to make more you want to make more of yourself for me i didn't have another option for me as a kid i we didn't grow up with very much i had hopes and dreams and i was like i need to make the best of myself and there was no other choice but no one would no one would sit on your dreams or anything my mom and dad thought it was perfectly plausible for you to become a doctor well they actually they actually wanted me to actively yeah they were like yeah absolutely you should do then like and they encouraged it and you know i i would say that you know they were very much pro it um which is why the creativity kind of i think took a like a bit of a it was put on the back burner for a bit but in a way medicine becomes the combination of both doesn't it it's i mean it can be quite a creative pursuit anyway it's curiosity coupled with problem solving so you know maybe not as expressive a form as more obviously artistic pursuits, but still something that can address those urges inside you, the urge to understand things, to explain things as well, to communicate, and crucially, I think, to change how people feel.

25:30Yeah, absolutely. I also quickly learned, I think, that if I pursued that sort of academic route and did my best and achieved, people responded really positively to it. So it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do this and people will, you know, praise you. You'll be seen. Well, you've spoken about this desire to please everyone around you. How linked might that be to the othering as well? Would there be an idea that if I can please everyone around me, I won't get called those names again? It's safer. Do you think? It's safer then when you please people around you. If you become an asset, then people treat you differently.

26:08And again, it's sad that a child makes that realisation. and do you think you did actually consciously yeah probably in hindsight not looking at the at the time i probably didn't just thought this is what i've got to do this is what this feels good and it feels safe um and i think for me it was yeah it was it was about feeling safe and secure and feeling like i was valuable and i was seen i wanted to be seen unfortunately i think i was only seen for part of me yes um the part that people found palatable the part that people found acceptable and conventional. I wasn't at the time seen for the whole of me and I think it took a lot longer for me to be seen for the whole of me.

26:50And you're now at an all boys school before we get to the to how you rose to the challenge that Mr Mangle had set out before you. How did all of these things that we've discussed translate socially? Did you have lots of friends? I think you've talked about being lonely but or a little geeky and desperate to have friends so how did that bit of your life yeah it's i you know i was i was a nerd at secondary school and i loved being and i was surrounded by friends who were nerds and we were all nerdy together and there's the nerds will take over the world as they are quite rightly um and i loved it i had a small group of friends right and that was enough that was enough for me i just wanted to feel like i belonged to something and i did um and we challenged each other the best part of it was that not only did we have similar interests but the nerdiness made us work harder because we all did that and we all did that together it's your thing yeah also the other weird thing about me was i developed this weird shyness when i was in secondary school i didn't want to stand out i absolutely did not want to stick out at all i wanted to fly under every radar um unless it was academia which i didn't do to stand up i did that to get further right but i didn't want to stick out at secondary school you stopped performing did you you didn't do any more singing didn't do any any of that no none of that none of that i just think that came from i didn't it didn't feel like it was a priority at the time i was like i have to get through school to get to university school was a means to university and therefore i'm going to have to perform academically as much as possible and although saying that gcc was probably the last time i did something creative because i did gcc music and i did gcc art okay um and i did all right in them actually i did i got an a star in art and an a music um and that was probably the last time i think i'd put any effort until a lot later and so it was straight sciences for a levels yep yep uh with with both eyes with Maths.

28:53Fixed firmly on medical school. Chemistry, biology, maths. Wow, that's hardcore. Yeah, but that's, I mean, it sounds hardcore in hindsight, but at the time it was like, yeah, this is what I've got to do. And had you started to believe you were clever enough by now? I thought I could do it. Yeah. I thought I could do it. When did that pendulum swing? I think it was a cumulative thing. GCSEs was the first time. Right. When I thought, bloody hell, I got two A stars and 10 As at GCSE. Was anyone else surprised? everyone was blazed I think all my mates were as well I didn't even go to you know when kids go to get their results from school I didn't even go to do that because I didn't feel confident enough that I would have done well enough so I waited for them to be delivered home and I remember them coming through the door and I think everyone was just like flipping heck I was like oh wow okay maybe I can do this thing um and yeah that was probably the first time I thought yeah oh gosh I can do it I can actually do it and that was a solid recognition that I could do it tell me about mum and dad that morning I think they were really pleased they were really happy bless them to them again it was just a case of you know right okay keep going you've got to keep going right next this is brilliant well done was that pressure yeah it was It absolutely was.

30:20But they, remember, they don't know any different. From the most beautiful of places. They don't know any different. Of course. To them, it was parenting. Yes. Right? We don't get a manual for parenting. To them, it was parenting. To them, it was right. Okay, now you've got to do well in your A-levels and you're going to get into medical school. So it was very much prescriptive.

30:46so you arrive at guys king's and saint thomas's medical school which is part of king's college london um i mean you'd been at an all boys grammar school yeah and you'd grown up with two brothers so i mean was it was it much of a culture shock the first time away from home yeah you did stay out did you you were in halls and stuff so there's quite some fairly big changes now definitely life definitely um i did a lot of growing up i think at university um new circle of friends new people predominantly uh we had a significant uh non-white population in our university years so it was more brown people i think than i'd ever seen in my school in a sort of educational capacity um and everyone was a high performer but they'd have to be to be everyone was a high So that's new for you as well.

31:35You'll go from a big fish in a small pond to being an average sized fish in an enormous pond. Yeah, exactly. And also, for some weird reason, I think academia became sort of too suffocating for me at that point because it was so difficult. I'd gone from, like you said, feeling reasonably confident and comfortable that I could do it to failing my first exam on the first year. and I'm going to retake it and thankfully I passed um it's it was a complete shock to the system but also I think at that point I realized that academia wasn't everything and my creative side started to come out I started to sing again in a college choir in university um I joined a community sort of choir singing group that was run by a charity just around the corner from guys hospital charter house trust um and i started as i gained confidence and got it back i started to put on shows at university charity shows to raise money for charity and we put on live events um and i loved it absolutely loved it and the shyness is retreating again now it was yeah i started to find my mojo again i remember i used to i i fell in love with music so much i used to go to the hospital the guys university had a chapel on site and the chapel had a piano in it I used to go and play the piano or try to teach myself how to play piano because I loved it so much and I remembered loving it so much and I used to sit there and the chaplain would sometimes wander in and there'd be all sorts of people coming in and out and the loveliest people making the loveliest comments I used to sit and just play and sing and there was a homeless chap that came in one day and we had a chat and I remember the chaplain saying to me that the next time I said thank you for speaking to that gentleman because you probably don't know he's homeless and he comes in and he comes in for a chat and that was really nice of you to do that and I was like I didn't have a clue um I just wanted to sing what feeling do you get from singing and and from music that how would you explain it to somebody who's never felt it it is pure unadulterated joy it is magic made manifest it is it i it's really hard to describe um think about the whole concept of singing why do we sing as as as human beings why what's the point of music what's the point of singing vocalization being able to make these noises is a side product of us being able to protect our airway and close our vocal cords so we don't you know aspirate the food and drink that we eat noise was a side product of that byproduct the fact that we sing is something else it's it's like it's like separating the brain from consciousness it's separating vocalization from singing singing is something that is beautiful it's magical and and yeah it it just makes me happy and it's good that you can't explain it because you can explain everything else you've ever done in your life can't you i mean that's who you are you want to understand this you want to take this to pieces you want to put it back together you want to show other people how it works but singing just is yeah i don't mind not being able to explain i had an audition this morning for a musical i did the tour of ann juliet the musical uh last year we finished it and I've fallen in love with musical theatre and I've been auditioning for stuff and it's hard because I don't come from an acting performing background so I'm learning as I go along I very much recognise I'm on a back foot here Do you like that?

35:22Because it's the first time you have been in a long time Do you know what? I don't like it because it makes things harder It's scary It's really scary but also I like challenges I want a new challenge and I know this makes me happy and it's part of feeding my soul. And yeah, so auditions are terrifying. They really are. But that feeling you get when you're on stage and you perform and it makes people happy. Hell, isn't that what we're here for? Some of us. So did you know what you wanted to specialise in quite early on in your mental state? So tell me about that realisation. Because I mean, looking at the chronology of your life, it makes absolutely perfect sense.

36:07It does, doesn't it? But not to you at the time. No. I left, I finished medical school, graduated. We're in 2003. 2003. Degrees in medicine and pharmacology. Yeah, so I had a BSc in pharmacology and a degree in medicine and surgery. Started my first job as a junior doctor. You do adult medicine and adult surgery. I didn't like it. Really didn't like it. That must have been quite significant. Yeah. What have I done with my life? If I've ended up doing something I don't like, put years into training. Do you know what it was? I felt like getting there and thinking, this isn't the job I thought it was going to be.

36:43Purely not because I didn't like the job. It was the circumstances. I worked a lot in elderly care. And the saddest part of elderly care, I loved that job. And I loved the people I worked with. It was really hard. And often you ended up doing, not being able to do the best job you could do. and seeing these elderly people sitting in hospital waiting for social care beds and then passing away whilst they were waiting i was like this isn't what i signed up for like i when a patient on your list dies it shouldn't come as a oh that's one less person that i've got to worry about it shouldn't ever be that and it was getting to that stage and i said this isn't what i signed up for so i took a year off started redecorating my parents house because i love doing stuff in my hands started wallpapering painting doing flooring etc went for my first pediatric interview because i thought okay i'm going to probably end up being a gp um because i loved my gp placement when i was a med student um thought okay i'll go for a pediatric job because i i like my peds place but when i was a med student it's going to be useful as a gp as well went for it went for an interview ended up getting a rotation in pediatrics ended up getting a job and i thought and it weirdly doing that job pulled me back in it reminded me of a type of medicine where it isn't doom and gloom where people aren't necessarily floundering for months on end waiting for somewhere to go it gave me that sense of purpose back like this is why i became a doctor this is why i became a doctor because working with kids i mean you fortunately most of them bounce back and even even if they don't you can make their lives better and i thought finally a type of medicine that i find fascinating that i love working with the people are amazing that work in it and actually i feel like i'm making a difference pulled me back in and there i was for the next 20 years And you move back into geek mode in a way that you get your head down and set your sights on becoming a consultant.

38:49Yeah. Yeah. But alongside that, kept dipping into my creativity. What sort of things were you doing? I do like bits of music here and there. It wasn't anything major for the first five years of being a junior doctor. It wasn't anything like significant until I had a coffee with a producer from the BBC who said, do you fancy like helping out with some TV stuff? because they were looking for a young people's doctor as a sort of consultant. And I was like, yeah, why not? It sounds like fun. Did it as a hobby. Did it voluntarily. And it gave me, and I very much thought, okay, this is me doing medicine, but to the public.

39:26It's health promotion. It's part of my job. Did it for free. Did it as a hobby. And then it just... What was that first job? It was Revealed, which was part of BBC Switch, which was their young people, sort of 16 to 25. But before BBC Three, kind of, it was the prototype almost. And I was advising them on young people's health topics and subjects. And gradually they, from behind the scenes, I said, how do you feel about being on the screen? And I was like, well, do you know what? I'm not trained in it, but I'll give it a go. Like, it sounds like fun. And then I just sort of built upon that foundation, learned the ropes, learned the rules, learned the trade.

40:04My name got passed around. and before I know it, I had a second career as a media medic. But you enjoyed it? Loved it. Yeah. Because having not been creative for ages, it felt like I was being creative again. I was doing medicine in a creative way. And then my children's show happened. Yes, which was an absolute game change. How old are you now? How old are you under CBeebies? Let's say CBeebies, I was 30-ish, around about 30. early 30s um yeah i mean you're obviously not a show-off i mean you're a show-off in a good way in that you like standing up in front of oh yeah but you're not conceited so you might not be comfortable with this question why are you good at it why am i good at showing off no why are you good at communicating with children why are you good at presenting tv shows what is it that you bring to it that other people would not um i don't think necessarily i bring what other people don't I think I recognize what people want to hear and what people need to hear.

41:09People, when I'm communicating something scientific, medical, whatever it is, no matter who it is, it's about being with them. It's about making people feel comfortable, feel seen, feel heard, presenting information in a way that's relatable. that they could i want someone the person i want to be i said the kind of doctor i want to be is that or any kind of person i want to be is that you can come up to me in a pub and have a chat no matter who you are come up and have a chat and we can talk about anything and i want to be that kind of approachable and i think it's it's about being able to take yourself off your high horse and your pedestal and take away the dr bit of my title and just be range and just be like right let's have a chat i've got this stuff that i can tell you i can help you out with a bit of information or maybe whatever it might be that's what i'm here for what though i mean because from from the outside they're very different things aren't they i mean there is no mystery about what the most magical things must be when you are in emergency pediatric care and you save a child's life yeah boom well how can this be in any way i'll tell you something i don't know if I've told anyone this before, but many years ago, I was doing a junket at Warner Brothers in LA, and it was ER at the time, and so they're all on stage, Noah Wild, George Clooney, and there was this guy from GQ who was a right old troublemaker, and he stuck his hand out, and he said, don't you ever feel guilty that you make way more money than real doctors do?

42:46And that whole room went silent, and the PR person's having a coronary in the corner, and all this sort of thing. And one of them said, I forget which one it was, it's a long time ago, said, yeah, obviously, what we do is not as obviously valuable as what doctors do, but what we do is valuable too. Yeah, exactly. And we don't have to pitch professions against each other. I mean, I get it a lot. I'm not going to lie. I do get people saying to me, if I do something on TV, why the hell are you not in A &E? Why the hell are you not seeing patients? They don't get the concept of the fact that we do get time off work.

43:21and we are allowed to do how dare you um but also from colleagues like i've had people think and believe that the reason i ended up working in the media because i couldn't do my day job um so i'm constantly trying to prove myself i'm constantly trying to say to people i am good enough to do i can be both you don't do not put me in a box because i'm not i don't fit in any of them well you and you discovered that in your personal life as well towards the end of your 20s and i know you've spoken about this and i want to focus on on your half of this story not not not on your um not on anybody else's because that there's lots of people involved obviously but but you you once again it's happened a few times in your life you've ticked all the boxes it's a phrase you use quite a lot yeah you've done all the things that you thought you needed to do to achieve x and then you get there and x isn't there you you are not feeling the sense of fulfillment you're not feeling the sense of satisfaction and crucially i think you're not feeling the happiness that you're expected to feel when you've done all of these things yeah and this is where obviously you started to to think about your sexuality yeah i think i just to give context i got married when i was 26 and then i got divorced when i was coming in well 30 um and i grew up like many things i you know i colored within the lines i did whatever needed to be done um and i was very much conditioned by i think society my environment etc the times that i i thought this is what my happiness is and when i got there and i realized i wasn't completely happy it threw me completely i thought what's going on i didn't grow up in a world where you could be anything other than heterosexual or or or actually i grew up thinking that sexuality isn't black and white But I know that I don't quite fit into the homosexual sort of bracket.

45:14So that's not me. And that's not where my happiness is. I want to get married. I want to have a family. And I did that. I got married. And, you know, it was a lovely relationship. It was brilliant. I will never regret anything. And I will never speak badly about anything or anyone. There are lots of people involved in this situation. Everyone's story is important. And everyone should be heard. um i've always said that um but for me i grew up and i wasn't i got there and i wasn't completely happy and then when it broke down i had to do some proper soul searching and that's when i think i realized hang on a second you've been running on 60 your entire life and you've been doing that 60 for everybody else what you haven't done is do anything for yourself did this involve therapy yeah i went into counseling after that relationship broke down um and then as a result of that i was able to one acknowledge fully that hang on a second and i used the term i know people i know people may not necessarily like this word because it was used in a drugged way i use the term queer it's taken me years to realize that i am queer easier to say that you're gay because everyone understands what that means queer is anything that's basically not heterosexual and it includes anything any kind of bi pansexuality fluidity sexuality identity all of those things are fluid they change as we grow some of us are lucky enough to know exactly who we are from a young age and the world accepts it and we fit in some of us don't so i learned i it took me time to learn and i i therapy helped me with that i was able to then be openly myself and i it took me several years after that to still work out who i was i didn't wasn't as if it clicked and i was like right i'm this i've recognized who i am that no it took years and yeah that's it's still ongoing now i mean for everybody healthy absolutely mentally healthy we're never finished are we i for me therapy was like i'd lived when you said 60 it resonated with me that you've lived in this house all your life and you love the house right yeah but then you find out it had a garden yeah exactly and i and i thought i couldn't ever go into the garden yeah because i thought that's not me yeah that's not who i am and that's not what i want um and then you know it was it was 30 30 31 years old when everything sort of came crashing down and i had to pick up those pieces with with the help of my friends my family and my chosen family you were expecting i would imagine some upset or rejection particularly from family yeah when you came absolutely absolutely um and that's the biggest fear for a lot of people who want to who are going through that process of becoming you know their authentic selves the fear is always that i would be rejected that i wouldn't belong to something anymore again and actually what i found through being able to be myself that i belong to so much more than i thought and that was the best thing about it almost it was it was it wasn't a pleasant process i was and i haven't told many people this i was outed to my parents i didn't know that and i was outed by my in-laws right my wife was the second person i'd ever told that i wasn't 100 % straight after we broke up and i went i was going through therapy and obviously that news that conversation was you know difficult emotional but you know actually really important between the both of us um and then when the news started to get out i was outed before i was even ready and even worked out myself who i was and i was still in the process of and that was the first time my parents heard that and it was really hurtful really really hurtful um but they were at the time i remember saying to them bear with me i'm just trying to work this out you've not only are you reeling from the fact that your son is going through a divorce you've just been dumped with this information that you don't understand because it's not never been part of your world and it must be so confusing and i'm so sorry that you're going through this it's taken me 30 years to get in you're doing it in 30 minutes um bear with me bear with me and they did they trusted you they did they bared with me and even if they didn't understand it i think they bore with me and then it was not until good till 2018 when i was in strictly when it came out again because someone at my mum's work went up to her and showed her a newspaper article saying oh what's this i'm seeing And me and my parents sat down properly and had a proper conversation about it because I'd never felt ready.