‘There were people dying all around us’: An oral history of Channel 4 sitcom Green Wing

Twenty years ago, Channel 4 rolled the dice and the result was Green Wing.

The fact you’re reading this is proof the risk paid off – but back in the early 2000s, when Smack the Pony’s Victoria Pile was challenged to “make a sketch show with a narrative”, she wasn’t so sure she would succeed.

After persistence, though, Pile created a sitcom based in a fictional hospital staffed by a ragtag bunch of weird and wonderful characters who would spend much of the episodes doing anything but work: Green Wing is the only show set in the medical world featuring crossbows, camels and naked recorder playing. There’s also incest.

When the show premiered on 3 September 2004, it was a hard sell – surreal, offbeat and un-PC – accentuated by the now-signature use of speed-up and slo-mo shots, which added a balletic feel to the chaos. Pile had even convinced Channel 4 to extend the running time of each episode. Whereas most sitcoms run for 20-30 minutes a pop, Green Wing’s instalments clocked in at one hour with adverts.

“That was completely accidental,” says Pile, revealing that editor Billy Sneddon had an embarrassment of riches when it came to chopping the episodes together. “I think with one episode, Channel 4 went, ‘We’ll skip one commercial break to fit it in,’” Mark Heap, who played the bumbling consultant radiologist Dr Alan Statham, adds. “It’s lovely to let something be as long as it needs to be. It wouldn’t happen today.”

That phrase right there – “It wouldn’t happen today” – perhaps sums up Green Wing most effectively. Watching the show, which permitted its stars to workshop Pile’s scripts on the fly thanks to longer production slots, felt like you were witnessing a rising crop of comedy stars riffing off each other in real time. The result was raw comedy mostly absent from TV today; lengthy development and rehearsal time, due to budgetary restrictions, is a thing of the past.

To mark the show’s 20th anniversary, The Independent spoke to Pile and a number of the show’s cast members about their core memories, the wild antics their characters got up to, and their fears of corpsing and getting mistaken for real hospital staffers while filming their scenes.

In 2002, Victoria Pile, enjoying success with sketch show Smack the Pony, is asked by Channel 4 to devise a new series.

Victoria Pile [creator]: My team was asked what we could do that marries the comic freedom of a sketch show and characters with a bit more longevity. We were really unsure. It was very much an experiment – a terrible gamble. We had no idea if we could. We were lucky to be given the opportunity to make a pilot, which doesn’t really happen anymore.

Tamsin Greig [Dr Caroline Todd]: She said it was impossible but obviously that got under her skin and she couldn’t let it go.

Michelle Gomez [Sue White]: Victoria Pile has one of the most original imaginations. She plucked this whole thing out of her head. I think it was called Green Wing because a green fly landed on a script in her office.

Mark Heap [Dr Alan Statham]: I knew the wonderful Vic Pile who said there was some silly thing about hospitals she was doing. She said, “You probably can’t be bothered but would you come in?”

With an idea in motion, Pile sets her sights on casting and asks numerous actors to do in-character hot seat interviews. Slowly, the cast of Green Wing is assembled.

Victoria Pile: There were some people I knew I wanted to work with, like Mark Heap – people who we knew could hit the comic sensibilities that we were after – and other people were a total surprise to us. Michelle completely blew us out of the water. We’d never heard of her before and she just leaned into the madness.

Michelle Gomez: I just could not get a job. Nobody really knew what to do with my face, especially when I was younger. I was in a furious mood and I was basically going up for a line in this thing. I remember doing something outrageous, like licking an envelope, so it was a combination of – this sounds very crude – a bit of tongue work and ripping Stephen Mangan a new a***hole.

Victoria Pile: Stephen Mangan came into the rehearsal room and just ran with it. He embellished whatever we threw at him. His improvisational skills were very, very impressive.

Michelle Gomez: The two of us together are outrageous and we made a few people blush, including ourselves. And then when I got the role, I think they bumped it up a little bit for me. It ended up being something more than it was initially meant to be.

Victoria Pile: We didn’t necessarily know the characters. We sat around talking about people we found funny in real life – sometimes it was a teacher or a first boyfriend. We stole names and characteristics. Somebody had worked at a temporary office job where there were two people called Sue White, and the second-in-command in Good Morning Vietnam inspired Alan Statham – the absolute hierarchical resentment that you’re not top of the tree. So we just created characters from real people and fiction and then Rachel Freck, who was our casting director, tried to interpret it.

Tamsin Greig: Victoria was meeting a lot of people and, because Black Books was out there, she got me in. But she didn’t know who she wanted me to be in the beginning: Caroline Todd or possibly Joanna Clore.

Victoria Pile: Some characters we couldn’t find for ages. We went through a lot of people – Mac [Julian Rhind-Tutt] was really hard. Basically, he was a goodie, but where’s his funny? That was tricky. So Julian was a gamble and it paid off. Pippa was quite hard too because that required a lot of physical comedy without necessarily having done that before.

Pippa Haywood [Joanna Clore]: I was there at the initial casting sessions – I remember doing an improv with Tamsin Greig, thinking it had all gone well and was really quite hopeful I was going to get the gig. And then I waited and waited, then heard it had gone to someone else. They did the pilot. I was totally dismayed.

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Mark Heap: Doon Makichan was originally in the pilot and then we had to reshoot. I don’t know why. [According to Pile, Makichan was pursuing “a drama opportunity”.] So we auditioned for a new Joanna. All of them were brilliant in a different way, but I think Pippa was so lacking in vanity. You could give her anything.

Pippa Haywood: They wanted me to go in and do a whole afternoon of improv with Mark. And you can imagine what that was like. It was like The Hunger Games or something. Can she survive this? Is she remotely funny? By the end of that day, I’d been offered the part.

Victoria Pile: After handing the pilot over, I can still remember thinking, “I’m f***ed. My career’s done for now.” Peter Fincham [former producer at TV company TalkBack] had been in our edit as we handed it in and said, “You really shouldn’t have had your romantic lead pushing a turd down the toilet in the first episode,” and that absolutely terrified me. I thought we’d blown it completely. I cycled home thinking we won’t hear anything again so it was a very nice surprise when Channel 4 responded very positively to it. Then they commissioned a series.

In 2003, Channel 4 commissions the series – but certain scenes from the pilot need to be reshot following Joanna Clore’s recasting.

Pippa Haywood: They had to reshoot all my scenes from the pilot and see if they could fit them in. There was a thing to do with Mac’s hair length; they had to do a lot of reshooting for that. It was a bit weird because they wouldn’t show me the old Joanna scenes, but they wanted me to do it a bit like [Doon] so it was a real hybrid. By episode two, I was claiming it as my own because I wasn’t repeating what someone else had done.

Victoria Pile: Julian’s hair was redder and very different. We kind of gave him a bit of a glow up. We wanted him to be a heartthrob but his previous roles had not been that – he’d been the nerdy type. In real life, he was a bit of a lothario out there, but he didn’t quite look the part so we turned him into a golden cherub. He was always his beautiful self but we helped him on the way. There are some original shots there because we didn’t completely reshoot it.

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Meanwhile, the cast gather to rehearse at the TalkBack studios in London.

Tamsin Greig: We then started this unprecedented thing that Channel 4 did where they gave the actors three months development time where we would sit in the TalkBack offices and be given material Victoria’s team of writers had come up with. Then we’d play around with them, improvising around certain things and they’d go away and come back with new scripts. Channel 4 will never do that ever again.

Mark Heap: We had so much time. The daddy longlegs scene with Boyce – we were filming it and the ending just seemed to fizzle a bit. I said, “It’s not quite there – can we leave it and pick up another scene?” Then we had a rehearsal the following week for that scene and we got it. The freedom to do that doesn’t happen these days because of financial constraints and what not.

Tamsin Greig: It’s just far too time consuming and costly. It does seem to me a false economy not to invest in that. Because what they got was a group of actors who are used to playing around and can come up with something fresh on camera. And you just see it. I don’t think there’s anything like Green Wing that’s ever been produced.

Pippa Haywood: We improvised the characters for quite some time before shooting anything and then we’d come back to the TalkBack studio and there’d be a raft of new scenes we’d improvise around. Vic would often throw a new idea in as we were filming, which kept it fresh all the time.

Tamsin Greig: Stephen Mangan looking like the donkey from Shrek – he said that in one of those rehearsal sessions and Victoria just wrote it down and popped it in.

Tamsin Greig: Those days down in the basement at TalkBack did feel a little like one of those eastern European theatre companies who stay together for years and produce a new type of Chekhov – not that we were all living together and having each other’s babies or anything.

Victoria Pile: It’s been written quite a lot about how much was improvised, but it all started off with the written word. Then we’d work with them and rewrite things. On set, they’d stick to the script but some – particularly Stephen and Mark – would be so irresistible in terms of adding a thing at the end. Not everybody enjoyed offering that part of it, though, so when people say the whole thing was improvised, it’s actually b*****ks.

Tamsin Greig: I may not be able to think fast but I can learn fast. In Green Wing, it was leaning into your own confidence, going, “Listen, if it’s rubbish then it won’t end up in the edit and that’s fine.” In the opening of the first episode, there’s a bit when Caroline is sitting at the bottom of the ladder on the phone talking to an estate agent who is supposed to have given her the keys to her brother’s house and she’s had to sleep in the car. She’s sitting on the bottom of the ladder and she kicks it and he falls. That whole speech was given to me on the day; I learnt that in make-up. So instead of being quick at coming up with stuff, I was quick at taking it in.

The actors grapple with the material – some of which has them doing some rather wild things.

Victoria Pile: Sometimes we would surprise them with what the script put their characters through, but I don’t think anyone ever said, “I’m not doing that.” Even in the naked scenes, Pippa and Mark didn’t bat an eyelid.

Mark Heap: The bar was set pretty low to start with. I always liked the idea of odd grubby sex because maybe people’s sex lives are a little bit more like that. They’re not like in the films, are they? Lovely music and lovely lighting and everyone looking beautiful. I’m not admitting I like or do anything we did in Green Wing in my personal life. The scene where I’m caught sucking Joanna’s toes – how does one prepare? A lot of TCP and a big deep breath. There’s no skill involved. I thought that was worth doing – imagine walking into a room and finding someone actually doing that? Her feet were perfectly fine but I did insist on a lot of antifungals.

Pippa Haywood: I don’t think my husband liked watching me do all that stuff with Mark. He thought it was good acting, but a bit disturbing to watch. I also remember we’d moved when it started and kids at my daughter’s new school were talking about it and she went, “My mum’s in that.” I said, “You’ve got to invite them over for tea so they know Joanna Clore is not your mother!”

Michelle Gomez: Sue White was the worst staffing agent in history. She couldn’t give a f*** about anybody. I think that’s one of her strengths. I didn’t think she was insane; I just thought she was really bored and misunderstood and that gave me the freedom to just kind of amuse myself. It was saying the things that people would dream of saying but never dare to – that was the springboard for Sue. She had a dead end job and fabulous hair.

Pippa Haywood: I had those tight skirts, extraordinary boots and a bra with loads of extra chicken fillets – they had names but I can’t remember them now. I also had to ask the makeup artist not to do my lip and eye liner, because she would just do it too well. Joanna just shoves it on in the morning.

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The actors film scenes in real hospitals in Basingstoke and Harrow – but routinely get mistaken for real staff members by patients and visitors.

Michelle Gomez: Sue looked the part so much that I was directing traffic all day every day. Everyone thought I worked there. I’d just redirect them.

Tamsin Greig: We got influenced by our surroundings – those hospital rooms, corridors and operating theatres were a character in themselves. The amount of times I had people coming up to me and the shame of me saying, “I’m not a doctor. I know I’ve got a badge, I know I’ve got poor handwriting, but I actually can’t help you.” There was the stuff of life going on. It was a wild environment, so you picked up on that, also. It was all sorts of wrong.

Victoria Pile: There were people dying around us, it was awful. We’d be filming in recovery, there’d literally be a patient wheeled up and they’d be like, “Guys, they’re about to wake up in your shot – can you move on?”

Tamsin Greig: We were filming in ICU recovery and then we had to stop and move out because there was somebody coming from surgery who needed that space.

Victoria Pile: The yellow corridor was the one that led to the intensive care unit – it’ll forever be in my brain how they were wheeling a trolley when Mac and Guy were throwing these squash balls behind them for Martin [Karl Theobald] to pick up – and they were really landing on all sorts of people, including this one guy who was being rushed to intensive care.

Mark Heap: I think we got a few weird looks and rightly so. You’re in the middle of doing some arsey thing and someone wheels past who’s literally at death’s door. Bloody twatty actors. But I’m glad we did it. It gave it a real look.

Pippa Haywood: The thing that made me feel awful was people thinking you were real. I had all that horrible overdone makeup and old bra hanging out, but I did have a name label and you’d often get people going, “Can you show me the way to radiology please?”

As the cast members received scripts, they realised the show was getting more off-the-wall by the week.

Michelle Gomez: The staff couldn’t give a f*** by the end. In the beginning, it was like, “Wow, the circus is coming to town,” and then they were like, “Oh, she’s riding down the corridor on a camel.”

Pippa Haywood: I was most worried that my brother, who is a cardiologist, thought I was taking the piss out of him. But he absolutely loved it and said the entire cardiology unit couldn’t wait for the next episode.

Tamsin Greig: The number of people who work in the NHS who tell me they love it. And I go, “I’m really sorry – it looks like a parody,” and they go, “It literally isn’t – that’s what life is like in the NHS.” Then I say, “Mate, I might not go to hospital again.” If that’s what’s going on, I’ll stay at home and sort myself out.

Michelle Gomez: For one scene, they rebuilt my office in a zoo with a live lion – I had to choose a lion cub out of three. The problem with a lion cub is you can’t touch them until they’re a certain age because the mother will eat them, so you have to wait until they’re three months old – and by that time they look like the MGM ident. None of them enjoyed me singing Elton John, “Circle of Life”. None of them. All the crew – big burly men – were just jumping up, clutching their pearls.

Pippa Haywood: I adored so much of playing Joanna but there were some scenes that were uncomfortable. There was this front of confidence but, underneath it all, she’s worried about ageing, she’s worried about lines around her mouth, she’s worried that she despises the only one who wants to sleep with her. It was quite tragic. I remember swearing like a trooper at lunch and Mark and Tam saying, “Pippa, you’re not being Joanna now.” I always get confused when I’m playing a character and, with that one, it was quite a dangerous position to be in.

Mark Heap: Setting fire to my arm was a fairly hairy day. It was very hot. They put this sleeve on me with a hand modelled on my own and there was a man with a bucket saying, “It will get a bit hot, but it should be OK.” But even after it had been put out, the sleeve got hotter and hotter, and I was getting fairly panicked saying, “Get the f***ing thing off.” It was a little bit iffy, actually, because inevitably you go a bit further than you probably should.

Pippa Haywood: I just loved the scene where I had to cram loads of doughnuts in my mouth.

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There were many moments when the actors couldn’t help but ruin takes by laughing. Most cast members didn’t mind...

Tamsin Greig: The scenes I did with Michelle Gomez, I’d think, “I have no idea what this woman is going to do next.” It’s slightly terrifying – but also thrilling. So you go through that door and you have no idea if she’s going to be nude, or whether she’s going to do a poo on the table. One time I came into the room and she threw a paper boob at me. I’m a f***ing terrible corpser so, if I look really serious in that show, that’s why I was paid.

Michelle Gomez: Tamsin Greig and I were quite bad. I find her to be one of the funniest people I’ve ever come across and we had to just look at each other. So we were a bit guilty of corpsing, but we didn’t care. Nothing ever felt strict. It was just a joyful time.

Tamsin Greig: There’s an outtake on YouTube of me and Stephen in a car when he’s singing an Elton John song stuck in traffic. They just left the camera rolling – and when I started laughing in the middle of that, that was me going, “I’ve laughed, now the take is over,” but they didn’t cut and I thought, “S***, get it back together.” Later on, when they do finally say cut, I just lose it. That summed up that show for me. The pure terror and joy of that unknowingness of what might happen. It’s priceless and to be really treasured.

Pippa Haywood: Mark is fabulous to work with but he gets really cross if you corpse because it might be the best take. There are so many outtakes of Tam absolutely wetting herself at something Steve had said, who didn’t mind at all, but there’s none with me.

Mark Heap: It makes me sound like a humourless bastard. Just sometimes you’re in the middle of something and a little gift from heaven comes down and you think, “Oh wow, here we go – something’s going on,” and then if someone breaks it then you’ve lost it. It’s gone.

Tamsin Greig: I was so glad when we were doing all of the operating scenes because I could wear a facemask. I was smiling all the way through those.

Pippa Haywood: I think the only time I laughed was when Olivia Colman shoved a banana down my cleavage. because we’d rehearsed so much with the skin on and then, of course, she peeled it in the scene. And we did it and… I couldn’t. Because she wasn’t Mark, I just laughed and enjoyed it. Mark would have been so cross with me.

Tamsin Greig: My only regret about the show is I don’t do many scenes with Dr Statham. We did have scenes and they could see I was just too beside myself. In the pilot, there was one scene I did where Joanna’s showing me round the hospital and she introduces me to Statham and he fondles her. I couldn’t control myself. It was great going onto Friday Night Dinner and having another opportunity to control myself around Mark Heap.

5 September 2004: After watching the final edit before the premiere, the cast sees the show’s signature editing style – in which it speeds up and slows down the action – for the first time.

Michelle Gomez: We had no idea about that until it was out, and that was when we were like, “Wow, this looks so different and weird and wonderful.” It was so original.

Tamsin Greig: People accused it of being style over content, but I think it’s a beautiful marriage of both. We didn’t know what the style was when we were making the pilot. Victoria would say, “I just want you to walk down that corridor.” I remember thinking, “This is going to be a really boring show because it takes a long time to walk down that corridor.” But of course, when we saw what they did with their two brilliant editors and the composer, it was just breathtaking. It felt like I was in an extended pop video.

Victoria Pile: It’s a love-it-or-hate-it, isn’t it? I remember getting a lot of flak for that in the first few episodes, like, “I’m seasick in the first two minutes,” but to me it became much more of a choreography. I like the actors moving in a balletic way and the music being synced to the action in a way you don’t normally get in comedy.

Mark Heap: The editing process cut through any crap bits. It’s a good segue technique to save time so you get other stuff in. It also gave it its own little flavour as well. It was a bit of a pragmatic thing but also an artistic thing.

Victoria Pile: The music was done by Jonathan Whitehead [under the name Trellis], who passed away during lockdown. He had a heart attack. He was only 59 and the healthiest guy ever. There wasn’t anyone like him. A musical genius. We’d throw things at him and say, “We want something that sounds a bit like Coldplay, but not as cheesy, and with the coolness of Radiohead,” and he’d just do these amazing mashups for us.

As the first series draws to a close, two big twists are deployed. Joanna unknowingly has incestuous sex with her son Guy, which then leads Guy to drive an ambulance off a cliff for a literal Italian Job-style cliffhanger.

Pippa Haywood: The twist outraged me most of all because Stephen and Karl were about four or five years younger than me and they were meant to be my children! That was obviously outrageous news to me and, yeah, quite uncomfortable. The bed scene with Steve, knowing he was my son is really... I instantly felt shame.

Victoria Pile: The cliffhangers – it was kind of like, “What else can we do?” We did it twice! We did write about three or four different endings but we kind of thought, “Let’s just dangle them all off an edge.” I know it’s cheesy but we thought, “Why not?” Other endings included an infestation of bees and there was also a big wedding-funeral ending with a lot of people in one bed.

After a successful run on Channel 4, the series returned for a second in March 2006 and was given one final episode, which aired on 29 December that year.

Tamsin Greig: Obviously we know there are certain elements of Green Wing that are of their time. The jokes we got away with back then, some of them where you go, “Ooooh.” We’re in a different landscape now. It’s great to see it’s not been whitewashed or cancelled.

Pippa Haywood: I think there are quite a few elements of it that wouldn’t happen today. The amount of sexual abuse that was going on within the relationship – I don’t think we’d have been able to do that. There’s not enough diversity in the show. It would actually be a very different show if it was done today. But the tenor of the humour and the mix of characters and the way of working – I think that hasn’t aged at all and I think that’s why it still grabs people and appeals to them.

Tamsin Greig: That was what was happening then and this is the stuff people are making now. We were different people. People don’t take it too seriously – it was never out to destroy because it had such a great heart about it.

Michelle Gomez: Nothing’s come close to Green Wing. It broke the mould. It still has so much love. I have a lot to thank Victoria Pile for. We all do. I’d done stuff before but this really got my head above the parapet.

Victoria Pile: People still say it’s their favourite thing they’ve ever done.

Pippa Haywood: I’ve done quite an eclectic range of stuff, but Green Wing is one of my highlights and favourite moments. So you kind of hope someone might know you from that because then you really enjoy talking about it.

Victoria Pile: Making Green Wing was joyful. The laughter we had and the combination of people, was just alchemy. Everyone made me laugh and that’s all you want in life, isn’t it? It was hard work, don’t get me wrong – really tough and stressful editing it and doing all that. But it was a very lovely experience.

Pippa Haywood: It is brilliant having 19, 20-year-olds coming up and saying how much they love it. They must have found it recently because they were in their cradle when we were making it.

Mark Heap: I seem to recall the very last scene they shot of the whole thing. We were in a pond in a park somewhere and I was basically rogering Pippa in the thing. It was in the night, in the dark, it was really cold, miserable, damp and we were having this sex scene, knowing that when they cut that was the end of the series. That was pretty surreal.

Tamsin Greig: I didn’t realise the first episode starts with Caroline Todd at the bottom of the ladder and, at the end, she floats away attached to the balloons. They didn’t know that’s what they wanted, but it realised itself: a person who was so downtrodden who floated away into pure heavenly joy.

In April 2024, a podcast reuniting all the main cast members is released on Audible, titled Green Wing: Resuscitated.

Victoria Pile: The show spawned a lot of new careers so we knew it wasn’t going to be possible to continue for a third series – so even when, this far on, with the podcast, they said, “Do you want to do another Green Wing?” I said, “No, how could we do that?” I kept saying no, and then I said I’d only ever do it if it’s all our writing team and all the cast, thinking that would never happen. And then bit by bit, it did happen and now there’s some discussion about whether that would translate back onto the telly. I’m not even going there in my head. Maybe a special.