The Herald Magazine

7 May 2011

SURGICAL SPIRIT IMOGEN EDWARDS-JONES ON THE SECRET LIVES OF DOCTORS

 COVER STORY
Words Susan Swarbrick
Photographs Jamie Simpson
‘It has glamour,
tragedy and excess.
A&E is our lives
in extreme’
Imogen Edwards-Jones, the woman behind Hotel Babylon,
is training her sights on the unlikeliest of targets: the NHS
I
mogen Edwards-Jones is talking
hospitals. More specifically the
things that happen in the dead of
night in accident and emergency
departments. Those murky grave-
yard hours between 3am and 6am when
the rest of the world is asleep but a legion
of doctors and nurses is poised on a knife
edge, waiting for the relative calm to shat-
ter into chaos in the blink of an eye.
The squeamish might wish to stop read-
ing here. We’re not talking about bumps
on the head or grazed knees. Rather, car
crash casualties so badly burned their
clothes hang in smouldering tatters from
charred bodies, heartrending suicide
attempts and a machete attack so vicious
the victim’s brain fell clean out on to a
hospital trolley.
There are the violent gang fights which
see armed police with flak jackets and
machine guns swarm A&E, the parents
who shamelessly use their offspring to
get their hands on drugs, and the elderly
6 THE HERALD MAGAZINE 07.05.11
woman with a hip fracture, forgotten and
left alone in a corridor to perish. Drunks
who leer in the faces of doctors trying to
treat them, nurses with plastic aprons
covered in blood and vomit on their shoes,
and the patients who present with a
colourful assortment of objects lodged in
places they really shouldn’t be.
Edwards-Jones, author of Hospital
Babylon, spent 18 months shadowing the
staff of some of the busiest A&E units in
Britain, her findings a jarring account of
the realities faced by those trying to save
the lives of the critically ill and injured.
“Hospitals today are about gunshot
wounds and knife crime; about drug deal-
ers on the wards and the drunk who’d
rather put his fist in a nurse’s face than
be told to wait,” she says. “What I found
the most shocking was not shortages or
waiting times, but the lack of respect
many patients have for staff.”
The names of the hospitals and protag-
onists have been changed, the chronol-
ogy of some events altered, but
Edwards-Jones insists all are real-life
experiences as told to her by A&E doctors
and nurses, credited simply as her co-
author Anonymous.
“It was done to avoid repercussions or
people being easily identified,” she says.
“There’s the story about the man who
loses his penis after taking too much
Viagra – and that is exactly as it happened.
His girlfriend had gone away for a week
and he ordered in some extra-curricular
fun, took too much Viagra and she came
home to find him without a penis.
“His erection didn’t go down after the
weekend but he waited days before going
to A&E. By then it had turned black. It
was effectively dead. Every man I tell that
story to winces. Then there’s a beat and
they ask: ‘How much did he take?’”
Imogen Edwards-Jones
We’resittingamidtheopulenceofupmarket has not spared herself from
London hotel The Goring, the place where exposure, having written a
the newly wed Duchess of Cambridge newspaper column about
the ups and downs of
her IVF treatment
07.05.11 THE HERALD MAGAZINE 7
COVER STORY
spent her last night as a single woman.
Although rather incongruous with today’s
subject matter, it’s perhaps �tting that I
should meet Edwards-Jones here. After
all, it was Hotel Babylon, her exposé of �ve-
star hotels which later became a TV series,
that kicked off her foray into some of the
world’s most secretive luxury industries.
Since then she’s penned a whole series –
Air, Fashion, Pop, Beach and Wedding –
with Hospital Babylon bringing the tally to
seven. While her warts-and-all account of
the NHS may appear to mark a downturn
in the glamour stakes, not so says Edwards-
Jones. “The NHS is the fourth largest
employer in the world after Indian Railways,
the Red Army and Walmart,” she says.
“What I �nd extraordinary is that it encom-
passes all of life. It’s got the best stories and
you can’t even imagine how much money
they waste. It has a bit of glamour, admit-
tedly not in a Michael Jackson, Evian bath-
type of way, but it does conform to the
Babylon idea in that it has the tragedy and
excess, the abuse of money and power.A&E
is our lives in extremes – all in one place.”
Writing Hospital Babylon, though,
surprised her in ways she never imagined.
“I thought the book was going to be funnier,
in a weird way,” she muses.“I have so many
stories of penises falling off and people with
things up their bottoms, and I thought there
would be more like that.”
Asking if she is beyond shockable now
prompts a thunderous laugh from Edwards-
Jones. “You do need a strong stomach,
although it’s the odd things that upset me,”
she says, her tone growing sombre again.
“There is an awful line where one of the
characters talks about a woman slowly dying
and says: ‘Every day she talked a little less
– and I talked a little more,’ meaning he
talked to �ll the void as she got sicker. It’s
that kind of slow death that gets to me.”
Being embedded in such a speci�c, insu-
lar world does have its drawbacks, admits
Edwards-Jones, describing it as becoming
almost being like Stockholm syndrome
after a while.“I get obsessed with detail and
develop a weird type of OCD with exactly
how much it costs per bed, per sheet, per
pillow case,” she says. “I like all that stuff,
but that’s where my editor comes in with a
red pen saying: ‘No. Boring, boring, boring.’
“For example, the names of all the drugs,
I had to take a lot of them out because they
became quite dull. Nobody can read a word
that has 16 syllables, is Latin and sounds
like a toxic plant.”
Interestingly Edwards-Jones discovered
some odd nuances in the world of emergency
medical workers. “It is fascinating how
their work impacts on their social life,” she
says.“One doctor I spoke to said he no longer
found naked women sexy because they
looked like patients to him. As doctors they
desexualise the body so much that, when
it’s naked, it doesn’t look attractive. This
chap liked girls in underwear. They had to
be semi-clad for him to get excited. He
found modestly showing a bit of ankle or a
lone shoulder sexier than naked.”
Sex is a theme that looms large. Were the
doctors and nurses she interviewed really at
it that often? “More,” shrieks Edwards-
Jones.“I had to take quite a lot of the sex out.
One doctor told me: ‘We would all have sex,
8 THE HERALD MAGAZINE 07.05.11
‘There was every night shift, it was just a way of passing
the time between 3am and 4.30am.’”
one plastic Edwards-Jones became au fait with
medical lingo, not least the use of quirky
surgeon abbreviations which range from DSH
(deliberate self harm) to SIMON (single
who was immature male obsessive neurotic) and
VTMK (voice to melt knickers).
in love with “I loved all of those. My favourites were
the O sign, which refers to the round and
his hands.
open mouth of someone on their last legs;
the Q sign, where the mouth is open and the
They were
tongue hanging out to one side; and the T
sign, which is the number of cold cups of
tea next to a corpse before anyone realises
soft and they are dead.”
Did Edwards-Jones encounter the well-
manicured’ known doctor’s God complex up close?
“Lots,” she says. “There was one plastic
surgeon I interviewed who was slightly in
love with his own hands. They were soft
and manicured. I imagine he went to bed
each night wearing surgical gloves with
some sort of royal jelly inside.”
After she publishes a book, is there a
witch hunt to unmask her anonymous
sources? “I signed con�dentiality agree-
ments so that, no matter how much vodka
you give me, I won’t tell you who they are,”
she says. “When I did Hotel Babylon there
was a brilliant ‘I’m Spartacus’ moment
when the GMs of various London hotels
started saying they were Anonymous.” Did
the real manager ever confess? “No. He is
very low pro�le.”
Air Babylon, meanwhile, was her biggest
project to date (“It was fascinating. One of
the guys who works X-ray machines told
me how to get a bomb on a plane. Obviously
I can’t say how to do it …”) while Fashion
Babylon remains one of the trickiest (“It
was such a closed shop, it took a lot of
champagne to get in there.”).
Edwards-Jones retains a soft spot too for
the outlandish event planners in Wedding
Babylon. “They were camp and funny with
a good sense of humour. Every day is like a
comedy for those guys: they see people at
their most mad – vulnerable, emotionally
traumatised and spending huge amounts
of money,” she says.
“I once asked one of them, ‘If I really
wanted to spend money at a wedding, what
could I do?’ and he replied, ‘Do you want to
burn it or melt it? Burn it: �reworks, £4000
a minute. Melt it: ice chandeliers, that way
you can literally see your money disappear
in front of your eyes drip by drip …’”
There are no plans for further Babylon
books, with Edwards-Jones concentrating
her efforts on writing a Gothic novel. “I
have no idea whether I can do it or if it’s any
good but I’m going to give it a go,” she says.
“Watch me fall �at on my face …”
D
ressed casually, her blonde hair
pulled back in a messy ponytail
(“Shall I take it out so I don’t
look such a dweeb in the photo-
graphs?” she asks later), the
author,42,is the epitome of yummy mummy.
She is married to TV producer Kenton Allen,
with whom she lives in Ladbroke Grove, west
London, alongside their daughter Allegra,
�ve, and one-year-old son, Raphael.
The whip-smart and bitingly candid
Edwards-Jones’s clipped middle-class tones
add a delicious edge to her wicked sense of
humour. A dab hand with one-liners, she is
unafraid to say what most people may
think, but wouldn’t dare utter out loud.
In 2004 she wrote a frank newspaper
column detailing her IVF experiences.
Suffering from an overactive immune system
which – in her own words – means she
possesses “natural killer cells which attack
sperm”, she and her husband were unable
to conceive naturally.“I was the only barren
girl at the party – that’s what it felt like,” she
recalls. Having undergone several rounds
of IVF unsuccessfully, her daughter Allegra
was conceived during “non-baby sex”, two
and half years of science pipped at the post
by a night of passion on the couple’s �fth
wedding anniversary.
“I had given up. She was a total surprise,”
says Edwards-Jones. “Then I had a lot of
problems keeping her. The doctors thought
she had skeletal dysplasia, a form of dwarf-
ism, and I was offered two terminations. I
had over a thousand injections while preg-
nant with Allegra. I was on steroids and
had a total change of white blood cells.
“The day she was diagnosed with dwarf-
ism we drove the 45 minutes home in silence.
As we pulled into our road, I turned to my
husband and said: ‘Well, there’s always
panto.’” Edwards-Jones laughs. “That’s
when we knew everything was going to be
OK. And Allegra was �ne, she didn’t have
skeletal dysplasia after all – she was just
little. She is going to be Kylie sized.”
Was Raphael conceived through IVF?
“No, vodka,” she says, laughing again. “He
was a joyous surprise.” Both children have
celebrity godparents: Allegra’s is her moth-
er’s good friend, Candace Bushnell, the
author of Sex And The City, while Raphael’s
is the actor James Purefoy.
Edwards-Jones grew up in the country-
side outside Birmingham. “We lived in the
middle of nowhere so it was quite boring,”
Clockwise from
above: the next
she says. “As children we relied on our
imagination and it was a little Lord Of The
project for Edwards-
Jones is writing a
Flies in that I spent most of my time without
shoes on, my siblings and I working out
Gothic novel; with
daughter Allegra, now
new ways of killing each other.”
She professes to being something of a
five; Max Beesley,
Tamzin Outhwaite
wild child, rebelling against the strict all-
girls boarding-school environment of her
and Dexter Fletcher in
the BBC adaptation
teens. “I had this screaming energy inside
me that was desperate to get out,” she says.
of Hotel Babylon; and “When I went to read Russian at Bristol
the author with her University I was immature and couldn’t
husband, TV producer believe I �nally had freedom. I would turn
Kenton Allen up to lectures in my pyjamas – I was a bit of
a twat. I still have my wild moments now.”
PHOTOGRAPHS: RICHARD
YOUNG/REX FEATURES Such as? Edwards-Jones gets a mischie-
vous glint in her eye.“I went to The Box last
week,” she says, referring to the exclusive
London club garnering a reputation for its
hedonistic celebrity clientele. “It’s great. I
was so drunk, though, I could only really see
with one eye. A man with silicon implants
– not pec implants, properVictoria Beckham-
style boobs – showed us his willy. I was
slack-jawed.”
On a slightly more sedate theme,
Edwards-Jones proudly reveals she is an
honorary Cossack.“My �rst book was about
the collapse of communism in Russia,” she
says. “I travelled from Moscow to Sakhalin,
crossing 11 time zones. I met some Cossacks
in Rostov, got very drunk with them and
they gave me a Cossack passport. It’s
genuine and stamped meaning I’m an
honorary Cossack and my son Raph can
carry a sabre in Russia.” Cossack Babylon?
It has a nice ring to it … n
Hospital Babylon by Imogen Edwards-
Jones and Anonymous, is published by
Bantam Press, priced £12.99.
07.05.11 THE HERALD MAGAZINE 9