Michael O'Donnell (physician)

Michael O'Donnell (born 20 October 1928), is a British physician, journalist, author, and broadcaster.

He became a full-time writer after working for 12 years as a doctor. On BBC Radio Four he was chairman of My Word! and wrote and presented Relative Values. On BBC Television he presented the O’Donnell Investigates … series' and, on Yorkshire Television, the controversial Tuesday Documentary Is Your Brain Really Necessary?. He has worked as a newspaper and magazine columnist, published three novels, edited World Medicine, and written and presented over 100 television and radio documentaries.

He was born in Yorkshire, the son of a General Practitioner, and educated at Stonyhurst College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied Natural Sciences. At Cambridge he joined the Footlights and appeared in La Vie Cambridgienne (1948), the first Footlights revue televised by the BBC. He was also a member of the Young Writer’s Group founded by Stephen Joseph and succeeded Joseph as editor of Cambridge Writing. His short story A Sense of Value was later reprinted, with a commendation from EM Forster, in an anthology of post-war Cambridge writing.

He completed his medical training at St Thomas' Hospital paying his way through the clinical course by working as a part-time scriptwriter at the BBC Variety Department, a petrol pump attendant in Streatham, and a stage lighting technician for the theatrical producers H. M. Tennent. He also teamed up with the pianist Catherine Dorrington Ward, who later became his wife, to form a cabaret act. When he applied for admission to St Thomas’s, he opened his interview with a tentative question, ‘Could this hospital countenance the notion of a part-time medical student?’ To which the Medical School Secretary replied, ‘Is there any other kind?

After qualifying as a doctor in 1952 he worked as a GP first in Fulham, then in Weybridge, Surrey. In 1964, when he retired from clinical medicine to become a professional writer, he worked for a time as a copywriter at the J Walter Thompson advertising agency, was a co-presenter and writer of the Associated Television (ATV) series You'd Never Believe It and wrote three television plays for ATV using the pseudonym Michael Bancroft.

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