Michael Akadiri: The Essex doctor who saves people by day and makes them laugh by night
It'd be hard to find someone to disagree with how important doctors are for our society. The people that are there to make you better, always being there for when you're most in need or when your life is at risk. Junior doctors are some of the hardest working people you will meet in the UK - and one Essex-based doctor manages to save people's lives while also making thousands laugh.
Michael Akadiri has managed to forge a successful career in comedy around his work as a junior doctor. The 32-year-old Londoner now works bank shifts for the Mid and South Essex Hospitals Trust while devoting a lot of his time to his comedy career.
He has seen successful shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and is now embarking on another UK tour with his latest show, "Trust Me I'm a Daddy", where he discusses how having a child thrown into his life brought more laughs than ever before. Michael comes to Chelmsford Theatre on Friday, October 25, and ahead of this, he spoke with EssexLive about just how he's managed it.
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"I call it juggling. I wouldn’t say I’m juggling very well, but I’m juggling somehow", Michael says with a chuckle. "During medical school, I noticed I enjoyed making people laugh. We’d be in a group setting and just having a chat; someone said something funny, and I would always add a little one-liner on top of what they said.
"I always enjoyed it, but there was nothing that thought it could be a career. We graduated, and I went into it, and people would say that I’m quite funny." From here, Michael decided to test his comedic chops by going along to an open-mic night to see if he could make strangers laugh, but it wasn't quite what he imagined.
He said: "When I got there it was a gong show, the audience has the power and cards go up, you get gonged off the stage. It’s very brutal. I didn’t realise that until I got there. I lasted 3.5 minutes on stage, and I thought that wasn’t bad for the first time I had ever been on stage. The euphoria you get from making a room erupt with laughter is a high like nothing else."
Initially, when his comedy began, Michael never talked about medicine. He lived a "double life", helping people by day, then changing from scrubs into new clothes to go and make people laugh in the evenings. But this changed after the height of the Covid pandemic when the public became more interested in the medical profession.
Michael said: "What really changed things was after 2020 when there was real interest from the public. It became almost exclusively what I would talk about, going to the Edinburgh Fringe that’s what I was talking about. It became almost like a niche."
Following strong feedback from his shows in Edinburgh, Michael has seen countrywide support for his work and has enjoyed several UK tours. Since his son was born, his clinical duties have taken a back seat, and his medical work is now focused in Essex.
"I’ve been working the Mid and South Essex Trust for about a year now," Michael said. "I've taken a bit of a step back clinically since my son was born. Normally, people go the other way; when they have a child, they work a bit harder and pick up more shifts. I decided to take less and signed up to be bank staff for the Mid and South Essex Trust. I do shifts on A&E and about three or four shifts a month to keep myself topped up, but my main income now is through comedy.
"I treated someone, and they saw a comedy clip on Instagram, and they message me “you treated me, you worked here”. In a normal case, you treat someone in a proper clinical setting, and you don’t see them again. I guess with doing a lot of comedy, you’re going to bump into people outside of the clinical setting. And you know what, I’ll take that."
Plenty of stories from Michael's time on the wards make it into his shows, and he has no shortage of funny tales from Essex. He said: "There are things that have happened whilst I worked in Southend. I was working on a Tuesday morning in A&E and a lady has sprained an ankle, saying she’d been out drinking. I thought that was a bit odd, it was a Monday night and to be drinking and spraining your ankle was a bit odd. But she was celebrating a Chelsea win, so that makes sense for going on a bender. That was the end of last season and Chelsea are doing a bit better now, but at the time I thought ‘you go girl’.
"To work in medicine you have to have a poker face, you can’t survive without them. I’m surprised it’s not on the medical school curriculum; stop caring if people have got a good biology A level; can they maintain a poker face? People say it so deadpan, and you think it’s so unbelievable. I’m trying to keep it professional, but very often, you’re like, 'Can you come again?'. There are so many weird and wonderful stories about the human body that I have."
Working in the medical profession in 2024 is no mean feat, with stories often being shared of how busy nurses and doctors can be, and just how hectic A&E departments can get. For Michael, there's no doctor that doesn't want to do a good job - it's having the resources to do it.
He said: "You want to do a good job; people go into the profession wanting to help their patients. But now, how the system is, it makes it difficult to do the good job you want to do. People get so worn out and burnt out from the job they’re in that they look for alternatives, such as going to Australia or the city in finance. But there’s nothing better than a patient coming in and then you resolving their issue and improving their life."
For now, Michael's life is focused on being a dad, touring his comedy and keeping himself busy with more occasional medical stints. But despite working less in hospitals now, his profession still ebbs into his life in surprising - and hilarious - ways.
He added: "I took [my son] to get circumcised, and when they heard I was a doctor, they said, 'Why don’t you do it?' I thought, what the f*** is going on here? Those are experiences I’ve had. Just because I can save a child’s life doesn’t mean I can raise one too; I’m just trying to figure it out as much as you guys."
Michael Akadiri's "Trust Me I'm a Daddy" show plays at Chelmsford Theatre on Friday, October 25. You can book tickets by clicking here.