Michael Mosley remembered by Dr Phil Hammond

22 March 1957 – 5 June 2024
His former TV colleague recalls an exhilarating advocate for self-help with a zeal for exposing health scandals

Read the Observer’s obituaries of 2024 in full

I met Michael Mosley in 1995, when he asked me to audition to present a TV series he was creating called Trust Me, I’m a Doctor. He wanted someone who wasn’t afraid to take down their own profession and I seemed to fit the bill. I liked him immediately, and we discovered we had a lot in common: raised abroad, the privilege of private school and Oxbridge and driven by escaping the fate of our fathers (mine died at 38 by suicide, Mike’s in his early 70s from the complications of diabetes). And we’d both married wonderful GPs to keep us on track.

Michael had stopped being a doctor and he needed someone who still was to take the flak. I was in a medical double act called Struck Off and Die, with Tony Gardner, and we used to ridicule doctors who preferred the glamour of the TV studio to the prospect of examining haemorrhoids in some chilly provincial surgery. But Michael was so enthusiastic and persuasive. He also knew I was Private Eye’s medical correspondent, MD, and that I had broken the story that far too many babies were dying after heart surgery in Bristol. If I presented his series, he promised to put the full weight of the BBC science unit behind the show and that I could expose countless other medical scandals. Doctors would hate me but he would protect me, like a wise older brother. How could I refuse?

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