Christian Jessen is the dishy TV doctor who can make even the most yucky medical conditions seem interesting. Donal O’Donoghue talks to him about almost becoming a full-time musician and his most embarrassing body part.
“Your gut is vital”, says Dr Christian Jessen. “It is your gut that extracts and provides the nutrition that fuels your body. For most people it works pretty well but when it goes wrong it can be pretty horrendous and the symptoms can be very embarrassing. That’s where I come in. I seem to have made a name dealing with these sorts of problems.”
Indeed. Jessen is the doctor who fronts such TV shows as Embarrassing Bodies and Supersize Vs Superskinny. The ‘yuck factor’, as Jessen himself would put it, of these programmes is quite high (some critics would argue it’s their only selling point) but they notch up enviable audiences and are both returning to Channel 4 this autumn. Such success can partly be explained by the presence of Jessen, probably the dishiest real-life doc on the box. “It’s my job to make the show educational without it being boring”, says the thinking person’s crumpet – and so say all of us.
Jessen is a spokesperson for, among other things, Gut Week – seven days dedicated to digestive matters. According to statistics, the average Irish person is blissfully oblivious to the goodness or otherwise of what they eat. It is, seemingly, a universal trait.
“Absolutely”, says Dr J, who judging by the buff physique on his website is not among that lot. “More often than not, those healthy option meals are less healthy than the normal stuff. In order to compensate for reduced fat, which is where the taste comes from, they are absolutely loaded with sugar and salt.”
Jessen (32) is pretty fastidious about what he eats (although he is partial to a tasty dessert). “I’m a little bit obsessed with fitness and my figure”, he says. “I used to be a pretty skinny kid and I got teased about that and started hitting the gym and bulking up and that made a huge difference to my confidence.” He admits that he was bullied “a little bit” at his first school. “I was one of those kids who was not very co-ordinated”, he says. “That changed as I got older but I think it gave me a slight complex. It wasn’t some burning psychological issue but it did mean that I became more body conscious. I’m happy with how I look now.”
He’s also an unlikely doctor. “I really wanted to be a film and theatre director when I was younger”, he says. This did not go down too well with Mr and Mrs Jessen (his father is a PhD physicist), and they suggested that he give medicine a try - after all he liked biology. So he enrolled at University College London, where the older students terrified the Freshers with tales of having to drink urine as part of their studies. Not the most diligent of students, Jessen skipped lectures, preferring the extracurricular lure of the UCL orchestra (he still plays the oboe) and the college drama society.
His fellow tenants in the student hall were the band that would become Coldplay: bashing out lyrics and music into the night. “They used to annoy the hell out of us”, he says.
After college, he worked as a specialist in infectious diseases and sexual health, and a cameo for a BBC news story kicked off his TV career. “Once people see you as an expert and being telly-competent, your name gets passed around”, he says.
Following a number of appearances on morning TV, he was approached by the producers of a new show. That was Embarrassing Bodies: the show about wobbly bits, etc. “There is a body part that I generally dislike and that’s feet”, he says. “I hate feet. As a doctor I have to look at them but generally feet are pretty manky, particularly men’s feet, which usually don’t see the light of day for weeks on end. So when a bloke comes in and says he’s got a sore toe I’m kind of anxious."
His TV shows, he argues, are all about trying to make doctors seem a little bit more human. “I go out for a drink on Friday night and sometimes drink too much”, he says. “So when I’m on telly I try to be very human and down-to-earth.” He also doesn’t really abide by his own advice. Feeling unwell on one occasion, he waited a week before going to see his doctor. He was diagnosed with appendicitis. “I subsequently did a very honest interview with a newspaper but people were very nasty to me with their online comments”, he says. “I wanted to make the point that doctors are just human beings too and get scared of surgery like any other patient. I knew I had appendicitis but I was terrified of surgery, so I did that typical man thing; I ignored it.”
He reckons part of the reason shows like Embarrassing Bodies and Supersize Vs Superskinny are so successful is because “people are horrified and fascinated at the same time”. But he rejects criticism that they are purely exploitative. “It can be a bit of a freak show just to show a lot of massively overweight people”, he says. “The Guardian reviews every series of Embarrassing Bodies and rather disappointingly says the same thing every time. It’s either: (a) I don’t want to see this at 8 o’clock when I’m eating my dinner or (b) it’s just a freak show and the patients are just being taken advantage of. That really makes me cross because it’s exactly what we don’t do. The patients want to get their condition treated but they also want people to see that it is not unique.”
* Yakult Gut Week runs from August 22 to August 29. Further information from www.loveyourgut.com
