If CID were ever to investigate Christopher Peters’ internet browsing history, there could well be questions to answer. Those poisonings, lingering deaths, carefully timed comas in his searches all look highly suspicious. 

These are nothing to do with his work as a consultant surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, it is important to stress.

For a decade now, Mr Peters has been a medical adviser for several of the UK’s best-loved TV shows and some award-winning storylines. 

If there is a particularly complex murder in the BBC’s Death in Paradise or a prolonged illness in EastEnders, there is a strong chance Mr Peters is behind it. He has been involved in countless (fictional) stabbings too, taking a certain pride in avoiding more clichéd areas of the body.

‘I’m constantly having to come up with new places to be stabbed,’ says Mr Peters, with disconcerting cheeriness.

‘If the police looked at my computer, there’s an awful lot of web searches they would probably think are highly suspicious. How long does this poison take to work? Do hospital tox screens include this poison? I do sometimes worry I’m setting myself up for a problem down the line.’

Solving the plot

It all started 10 years ago with an invitation out of the blue to advise on a neurosurgical case in the BBC’s Holby City, through a family connection. He became a regular on the Holby advisory team for the rest of its run.

Since then, TV writers have moved on to other shows and taken Mr Peters with them: an adviser who can provide guidance on strokes as well as stabbings in Albert Square is highly prized. 

At the most basic level, he provides veracity: advice on standard treatment and procedures for common conditions and injuries; How long should a cast stay on a broken ankle? 

Or he might help ‘flesh out the story’ around a more complex scenario such as a heart attack: What might the symptoms be leading up to it? What might happen in hospital?

But far more exciting for Mr Peters are the invitations to work with writers to help shape storylines, to suggest medical conditions which fit the narrative arc and dramatic themes. 

So, in Death in Paradise, for example, ‘they wanted a character to think that they had killed someone immediately but the victim had to be able to walk a couple of miles and then die. I had to think: What poison can I give them? How would they find it?

‘Or I have to come up with a stabbing that incapacitates someone for exactly the right amount of time: for example, we want them to be in hospital, to think they’re going to die, to have an operation, and be pretty much back to normal in three months.’

This creative problem-solving is what Mr Peters loves and part of the ‘intellectual challenge’ is avoiding medical clichés.

‘Conditions like head injuries and comas lend themselves well to drama: often they want the person who is injured to not be able to say anything for a few days. Or they want lots of family interactions and dialogue across someone in a coma. So I will often try to look for alternatives. 

‘The classic in-joke in Holby City was “damaging the spleen”, which was a kind of shorthand for something going wrong in an operation. It was always a case of: What can we do instead? Making a hole in the aorta is a nice dramatic alternative.’

The finest actors

The advisory role has become ‘a nice diversion’ from clinical work and one he can generally confine to evenings and weekends, emails and internet calls. 

Occasionally, however, he is called to work on set. Here, the role is particularly exciting as he is collaborating with ‘people at the top of their game’: advising and coaching actors, proposing props or suggesting activities for extras. 

‘Some actors, when they’re being written out, killed off, are desperate for their death to be brilliant, to do it justice. A few times an actor has said: “Can we talk to the doctor about what it would feel like to be stabbed?” Which is an interesting question, because I don’t really know, not having been stabbed, but I’ve seen patients who have been, so I can infer what it would be like.’

He often trains actors to give credible impersonations of surgical techniques – notably Mark Strong who plays a surgeon in Sky One’s Temple. 

‘I’m quite pernickety about making it realistic,’ says Mr Peters, ‘because a lot of doctors watch these series, and it would break my heart if the actor was holding the scalpel wrong.’

But where close-up shots involve complex procedures, there is no substitute for the real thing: Mr Peters’ own hands. 

While the procedures are familiar, and the body parts prosthetics, ‘hand doubling’ can be stressful work. 

‘In most TV work, only one or two cameras are used, so you have to think of a way of doing it that looks good on camera, and you have to do it over and over again in the same way, so that it works in the edit.’

A lot of doctors watch these series, and it would break my heart if the actor was holding the scalpel wrong

Mr Peters

For the mini-series Trauma, in which Adrian Lester plays a surgeon accused of a fatal error, Mr Peters worked closely with screenwriter Mike Bartlett to design the surgical procedure at issue – and was Mr Lester’s hand double. 

‘In one shot, they panned from the patient’s head to his feet,’ recalls Mr Peters. ‘And as the camera crossed the torso, my hand was making the incision in the opposite direction. 

‘I can only cut a prosthetic once, and we only had three. And when I made the cut with the knife, which had blood tubing up the sleeve, the blood had to come out. The director was surprised I was so stressed about it, but when I make an incision in real life, I don’t have to time it with a camera.’

These are the shots Mr Peters will tend to watch back, with forensic scrutiny. But sadly, as for all actors, Mr Peters’ hands are at the mercy of the editing suite. The surgical close-up scenes in Trauma were considered too graphic and didn’t make the final cut.

He would be delighted to be summoned to the set of Death in Paradise in Guadeloupe, he says, but that’s not happened yet. ‘I keep on making up very complicated storylines and saying, “You really need a medical adviser on set”. And they say, “Yeah, we’re not flying you to the Caribbean”.’

Medicine with a message

One of the longer-running plots of which Mr Peters is particularly proud involved EastEnders’ Phil Mitchell in 2016. 

The writers wanted to reinvent Steve McFadden’s character – a predictably belligerent alcoholic – and find a medical condition which might help redeem him. 

Alcoholic liver disease and the health consequences portrayed in Mitchell’s decline provided lively dramatic interest: the possibility of a liver transplant also gave a strong public-health message about organ donation. 

The storyline was intended to counter ‘the George Best effect’ – the direct, negative impact on the number of livers donated for transplant each time the footballer started drinking again after his own transplant. 

‘[The George Best story] sat in people’s minds, the idea that the livers were going to alcoholics who were still drinking, which is just not true. So we were able to show how much effort Phil Mitchell had to put in to prove he was dry, how he was tested, to reassure the public there is a robust process for organ donation.’

The storyline was intended to counter ‘the George Best effect’ – the direct, negative impact on the number of livers donated for transplant each time the footballer started drinking again after his own transplant. 

‘[The George Best story] sat in people’s minds, the idea that the livers were going to alcoholics who were still drinking, which is just not true. So we were able to show how much effort Phil Mitchell had to put in to prove he was dry, how he was tested, to reassure the public there is a robust process for organ donation.’

Mr Peters recognises soaps such as EastEnders ‘are not public-health broadcasts’. But he is pleased when he is given the opportunity to spotlight little-discussed conditions or NHS issues, from Alfie Moon’s prostate cancer and Lola Pearce’s palliative care last year, to long waiting lists for CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy).

‘It makes me sound like a psychopath but I’m determined to give a character oesophageal cancer at some point, because that’s the cancer I treat,’ says Mr Peters, who is perfectly personable. 

‘But the writers haven’t bought it yet. Even the word oesophagus isn’t very accessible, and treatment for that type of cancer would probably be too long an arc for them. I’ll keep trying.’

Stranger than fiction

The real art and challenge in being a medical adviser lie in navigating a course between medical truth and dramatic pace, and being true to both.

A certain amount of dramatic licence is essential: current waiting lists don’t make for racy plotlines so residents of Albert Square tend to get far faster treatment than your average NHS patient. Diagnosis and treatment are often condensed too. ‘We can’t have three weeks’ worth of someone with cancer going for CT, MRI and PET scans, so we present it differently.’

But there are some red lines Mr Peters refuses to cross. He swiftly and routinely dismisses tropes such as unkind GPs and stereotypical portrayals of schizophrenia. He will not permit characters to defibrillate patients in asystole (who have flat-lined), despite Hollywood’s insistence on doing so.

Nor will he allow characters to ignore grave medical warning signs without consequence – and often challenges the 100 per cent success rate of chest compressions in some programmes.

Interestingly, the TV show he feels best reflects the kind of dialogue and relationships real doctors have with one another is Green Wing, Channel 4’s surreal medical sitcom, which he wasn’t involved in.

‘We don’t walk around being deeply respectful of colleagues all the time. We joke with each other, we mock each other. In some of the American dramas like Grey’s Anatomy, everyone is very serious and worthy all the time and it’s not a world I recognise.’

As a seasoned adviser, he is sometimes asked to suggest dialogue and takes pride in finding turns of phrase which fit with the rhythms of speech and narrative beats. 

One day, he would like to write his own show. It may be more Green Wing than Grey’s.

‘I always joke with my trainees: “Don’t mistake me for being arrogant. If anything, I am even better than I think I am.” I’ve tried to get that line included in shows and they’ve said: “That’s a bit over the top! No one would ever say that.” I say it all the time.’

(photo credit for actor Ralph Little, pictured top: BBC/Red Planet Amelia Troubridge)