How daughter’s illness put Bowker on medical drama road

No-one would suggest that Peter Bowker isn’t a loving, doting father.

But he is also a writer. So when he found himself, nine years ago, laying on a thin mattress next to a hospital bed on which his four- year-old daughter was recovering from a brain operation, one of many thoughts he had was that this was material.

“I looked around and thought, ‘one day I’ll write about this’,” says Bowker. “It’s what you do as a writer. If your mate comes to the pub, sits down and says, ‘I have had the worst day ever’, then you get the pints in because you know you’re going to be sitting there listening to him all night. We want to hear those stories. They all lived happily ever after...doesn’t actually interest us. We want to know the stories about when things go wrong.”

Bowker is the man to judge what stories we are interested in hearing – he’s been writing them for over 20 years. His latest is Monroe, a medical drama, shot in Leeds and based around the misanthropic character from which the series takes its name, played by James Nesbitt. When we speak it is just hours before the first in the series of six programmes, filmed with the help of Screen Yorkshire, is broadcast on ITV1 primetime.

As executive producer Bowker not only conceived and wrote the scripts, but has had a hand in all aspects of the programme, from casting to the final edit.

He is upbeat and the following day’s positive reviews suggest he was right to be confident – most reviewers point out the similarities between Monroe and American medical drama House – both set in hospitals with a deeply flawed but brilliant male medical character at their centre. Bowker doesn’t mind the comparison, but insists he never set out to write a British version of the US hit.

“I can, hand on heart, say that I had never seen an episode of House before I wrote the scripts and when I came up with the ideas,” he says. “I have since seen a couple of episodes, and I like it, but this is very different.”

In Bowker’s series the main character is neurosurgeon Gabriel Monroe and Bowker, who also wrote the script for last year’s ITV adaptation of Wuthering Heights, says the inspiration came when he met and became friends with Henry Marsh who appeared in the documentary The English Surgeon.

“We were walking through the hospital and people were all but bowing as he went past. Neurosurgeons are treated like gods, and I just thought, ‘what must that do to you?’”

Then the writer in Bowker took over and he started to wonder whether there was any mileage in digging deeper into the personal lives of these surgeons who were put on a pedestal by their patients and their junior colleagues.

“What if the bloke who turns up to carry out brain surgery looks like the plumber?” says Bowker, a man blessed with a dark sense of humour. Even when chatting about the very serious time in his life, when his daughter was seriously ill, he finds it possible to make jokes. “That, he says, is one of the key elements that makes medical dramas so popular with British television audiences.

“I watched a brain operation as part of my research and while I was in there people were chatting away about the football, the weather, about anything. What I realised was that this was just their job, their everyday lives and I think it’s that clash between people who do this every day and people who experience this once or twice in a lifetime that makes hospitals such fertile ground for television writers.

“In a hospital you have a place that you can bring a character’s emotional baggage and it’s also a place where you can bring all races and classes of people – they are places where everyone goes and everyone can relate to.

“You can have people come into contact with other people that they would never meet anywhere else in their lives and I think that is a powerful drive for drama.”

With Casualty, Holby City and Doctors already on our screens when the publicity machine cranked into life for Monroe, Bowker was braced for the inevitable question. Do we really need another medical TV series? Had we not had our fill?

“It doesn’t make any sense to me because they are such great places for drama,” he says. “I don’t see why we have any kind of an issue with that.

“In America, if there aren’t three or four strong hospital based dramas on TV each week, it’s considered a missed opportunity.

“They are great places to tell human stories.”

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Monroe is on ITV1 tonight at 9pm.