Doctors and twin brothers Chris and Xand van Tulleken have their latest show Operation Ouch: Quest for the Jurassic Fart! set to open at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall for a strictly limited season from Monday 22nd December to Friday 2nd January. Dr Xand is the writer of the production (which is the fourth Operation Ouch live show) and they toured Australia earlier this year, which saw them perform six sold-out shows at Sydney Opera House. Having joined CBBC in 2012 for Operation Ouch, Dr Chris and Dr Xand had Series 13 release earlier this year, and they have just finished filming Series 14 of the BAFTA-winning show, set for release in January. Recently, Dr Chris has presented the BBC documentary Disease X: Hunting the Next Pandemic and Channel 4 documentary Joe Wicks: Licensed to Kill, and he is an infectious disease doctor at University College London Hospital, and released a book titled Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food… And Why Can’t We Stop?. On screen, Dr Xand can be seen in Dr Xand’s Con or Cure with Ashley John-Baptiste, has been the resident doctor on Morning Live since 2020 and has appeared on shows such as The Weakest Link, and for the last decade, Dr Xand has been teaching at London School of Tropical Medicine and University College London. Together, Dr Chris and Dr Xand host a podcast called What’s Up Docs?, which is released on BBC Radio 4 weekly and available on BBC Sounds. We chatted to Dr Chris and Dr Xand about their stage show Operation Ouch: Quest for the Jurassic Fart!, filming for the BAFTA-winning CBBC series Operation Ouch, their podcast What’s Up Docs?, Dr Chris’s book release and Dr Xand being the resident doctor on Morning Live.

You will be taking your show Operation Ouch: Quest for the Jurassic Fart! to Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall for a strictly limited season from Monday 22nd December to Friday 2nd January 2026, can you tell us about the show?

The idea for the show comes from the true story of the oldest farts in existence – there are farts preserved in amber emerging from insects’ bums around 50 million years ago!

For complicated reasons, Xand has decided to recreate a dinosaur fart (using Chris’s body – though Chris doesn’t know this) and so we embark on a quest to find the most important fart in history, involving lasers, magic, gastrointestinal physiology, genetic engineering and, of course, exploding farts.

Obviously all this is very embarrassing and so on the journey we learn how to handle one of the dominant emotions of childhood (and for many of us, adulthood).

What are you looking forward to for performing the show in London over the 2025 festive season and how are you preparing for the run?

The best bit about the live show is meeting the families that watch Ouch.

Some watch it for pure entertainment, some to help them navigate health problems.

Meeting the fans helps shape the show and we learn a huge amount from the audience: it was a family in Australia that told us about the farts preserved in amber! We’re also so excited to be at the Royal Festival Hall: one of the greatest venues in the world. Right on the South Bank so it’s a great place for a day out. The history of that stage is incredible but they have never had a farting dinosaur perform there before so they’re also honoured to have us, no doubt.

How was it touring Australia with Operation Ouch: Quest for the Jurassic Fart! earlier this year and what was it like seeing the fan response to the production?

Touring Oz during the summer (in the middle of the UK winter) is amazing and we love to meet the Ouch fans across the other side of the world. It’s wildly popular there: we did six sold-out performances at the Sydney Opera House! But we are excited to be at home for Christmas and to bring the show to the UK. We have fine-tuned it for our home crowd and I don’t want to give any spoilers but there may be a T-Rex in a shipping container on his way from Oz right now.

What can audiences expect from the show and who do you think it will appeal to?

There’s something in the show for the whole family: we know that at Christmas people want to come out as a group and we want everyone from 0-100 to have a great time. We know that there are people in the audience who are there for the silliness and the gross bits and others who really want some proper science. We’re able to do both. We think the reason Operation Ouch has been so popular for so long, as well as so successful (two BAFTAs and about 20 nominations) is that it is proper family viewing. Because the show is funny and entertaining, we’re able to put a huge amount of science in that you won’t get anywhere else.

Xand, as the writer of Operation Ouch: Quest for the Jurassic Fart!, what was the show like to write and how much did it change over time?

Jurassic Fart is the fourth Operation Ouch live show and Chris was very busy with work so he left me to write it. I really wanted it to be a quest because I feel very lucky to still be having adventures with my brother as an adult and I think the show captures that excitement: that there are so many things out there to be discovered. It also means that Chris is the guinea pig for all the experiments. Good science is about imagination and curiosity and using your identical twin to do research that it would otherwise be hard to get permission for. The show celebrates science and the quest for knowledge – along with the fear of failure that we all experience. Obviously I lean a lot on the material we have produced over many years with our incredible Ouch team.

How do you find the experience performing live on stage opposed to filming for screen?

The audience become characters in the story at several points – and, a bit like panto, there are loads of chances to shout out and to interact which are unique to the theatre. We know our characters very well – we’re really just playing exaggerated versions of ourselves – so perhaps the performing itself doesn’t feel very different. But it is so exciting to meet the audience, to hear them react and feed off their energy. They add a huge amount of warmth and humour and each show something new emerges so every show is a little different.

With Operation Ouch having its 13th series released on CBBC earlier this year, what do you each enjoy most about working on the series and having your own BAFTA-winning show on CBBC?

We’ve just finished filming Series 14, which is coming out in January. We’re so lucky to be doing it: very few people get to mess around with their siblings as adults while also learning a huge amount, and doing something that we really feel is important and helpful for so many families. The most special part of filming is seeing our Ouchers – the kids who tell their own stories about their health on the programme. They’re inspiring, fascinating and hilarious.

Do you both remember how you felt when the first episode aired in 2012 and how has it been developing the show for over a decade?

We had no idea that it would turn out like this – the first series is quite serious in many parts, and there’s far less emphasis on children telling their own stories. I think each series has got better and better as we’ve become more confident tackling more difficult topics and giving the children a voice.

Have you had any stand-out highlights from filming for Operation Ouch over the years that you can share?

We both felt that filming the special episode on cancer was extraordinary. It is a disease that touches every family in the UK but very difficult to put on children’s television. The Ouch team and the CBBC team are so fantastic and it took many years of work to get to the point where we felt able to tackle this.

Dr Chris – You have recently presented the BBC Two documentary Disease X: Hunting the Next Pandemic and the Channel 4 documentary Joe Wicks: Licensed to Kill, what were both like to be involved with?

When I’m not working on Ouch, I’m an infectious disease specialist at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. We are on the frontline for patients with serious infections and so we confront the very real risk of a new virus jumping into the human population every day.

It was great to be able to showcase the work of friends and colleagues around the world who are working to prevent that happening. A big lesson was that we need to respect the natural world and the life with which we share the planet much, much more.

Joe is an incredible advocate and so partnering with him to highlight the problems of our diet in the UK was fun and massively amplified the message. My research focuses on how unhealthy our diet is in the UK. Joe and I made the most unhealthy protein bar we possibly could but absurdly we were still allowed to cover it in health claims. The problem in the UK is that there are no warning labels on unhealthy food and so food that we are sure is bad for our kids’ health is covered in cartoon characters and health claims. We need to stop harmful food being sold as healthy and ultimately this means the government has to start regulating the food industry properly.

Dr Chris – Can you tell us about your book Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food… and Why Can’t We Stop? and how long had it been in the making?

We have some of the worst child obesity stats of any similar country and yet in the UK we have never had a theory about what is driving the problem. Sure kids eat too much sugar, salt fat and calories, but why? Why did they start to eat more of these things in the 1990s?

In 2020, I came across scientific papers proposing that, since a lot of food is made by big companies that exist to make profit, it’s possible that they are processing food (using flavours, textures, colouring and lots of fat, salt and sugar) so that it’s hard to stop eating. It’s a pretty reasonable hypothesis when you think about it. Ultra-processed food are products which are made by big companies to make money and sure enough we now have hundreds, possibly thousands of scientific papers showing that when they comprise a high proportion of the diet, they cause not just obesity but many other health problems too.

The book invites the reader to keep eating the food whilst they read – by the end of the book, many people find that they don’t want UPF anymore. I don’t promise that will happen but that’s my goal.

The ultra-processed food system isn’t just the leading cause of early death globally – it’s also the leading cause of plastic pollution, deforestation and loss of biodiversity. The problem is that UPF is all many people can afford, which is why we need government to protect people, especially children. If we are going to improve human and planetary health, we need to start taking this as seriously in the UK as many other countries around the world have.

Dr Xand – How is it filming for Dr Xand’s Con or Cure with Ashley John-Baptiste and can you tell us about the series?

There has never been a more complicated time to try to take charge of your own health: between social media, podcasts, newspapers and magazines, we are all constantly deluged with conflicting advice and much of it is anxiety-inducing. I have found it increasingly difficult, even as a doctor, to keep on top of all the wellness trends and the show is a response to that: we try to engage with the strange trends and look at the evidence and direct people towards trustworthy sources of information. Increasingly I think it’s very difficult to get trustworthy information from social media and I wouldn’t take any health advice from anyone on Instagram without checking it first with a more reliable source.

Dr Xand – You are the resident doctor on BBC’s Morning Live, what was it like joining Morning Live in 2020 and how is it giving advice on the show?

I love Morning Live so much – it is the very best of the BBC. I learn a huge amount from every episode and you can’t find this kind of impartial, considered high quality advice anywhere else. I think the key to the show’s success is that behind the scenes everyone is genuinely great friends. We hang out in our free time. My wedding had a whole Morning Live section!

Dr Xand – Having been a contestant on game shows such as The Hit List, The Weakest Link (both 2025) and Richard Osman’s House of Games, what are these like to do?

They’re very stressful and they make me watch game shows completely differently. It’s very hard not to take them extremely seriously, even though I always resolve just to have fun. I remember every wrong answer from all those shows (I didn’t know the correct medical term for smelly feet argh!). House of Games is such a beautifully-designed show and what you see on the TV is almost exactly what is recorded. It feels like a family game at Christmas… except I was more starstruck as I’m a huge fan of Michaela Strachan.

Can you tell us about your podcast What’s Up Docs?, which is available on BBC Sounds, and what has it been like to work on so far?

What’s Up Docs? is a podcast about health and wellness where Chris and I try to help the listener through the maze of confusing information. We are often as confused as anyone else despite our medical training, so we get on incredible experts to help us sort out what we do have to worry about from stuff we can all relax about. Hopefully it’s pretty reassuring most of the time. It’s on BBC Radio 4 every week and we try to tackle topics that everyone has questions about, including ourselves. Some weeks the topic might be quite medical, like menopause or how to look after your kidneys, and other weeks we look at wider aspects of well-being (how to have difficult conversations or how to defy other people’s demands on your time). Every single episode has made a huge impact on us: microplastics, fibre, false memories – these are all things that come up in everyday life and are in the headlines and so the two of us get to sort them out for ourselves and, we hope, the listeners. Because of the reputation of Radio 4, we are able to get experts from around the world. We hope we can keep doing it forever!

For those unfamiliar with your careers (Chris as an infectious diseases doctor at University College London Hospital, and Xand having a main interest and expertise in public health medicine, humanitarian aid and anthropology), can you say about your work and how you each got started in both the medical and entertainment industries?

We made our decision to go to medical school together: we both enjoyed science and liked the idea of using science to help people with their problems. I think we are also both quite nosy and interested in people and medicine is a great career for that.

We auditioned for Operation Ouch 15 years ago and then helped shape the show. That led to all the other broadcasting work. It’s great to be able to communicate about big issues (and small ones) to a huge audience and it allows us to meet experts from all around the world who are pioneering work in different areas.

Xand – Once I had qualified, I did some special training in public health and infectious disease and spent some of my career working in war zones and refugee camps around the world. That has become more difficult now that I have a family, but understanding the nature of violent conflict and the role that medicine can play in humanitarian crises still forms a huge part of my life. During the last decade, I have been teaching both at the London School of Tropical Medicine and University College London on these topics.

Chris – I followed Xand into specialising in infectious disease and public health. I still work as a doctor at UCLH in London, and I also do research which focuses on the so-called ‘commercial determinants’ of health – how big corporations affect our lives in good and bad ways – especially in the context of nutrition.

Do you have a favourite aspect of working as doctors, and also working on stage and screen together as twin brothers?

The best bit of working with family is that you have to be yourself. The world is full of doctors and health influences who want to persuade you that their lives are perfect and that if you take their advice your life can be perfect too. But if you work with your twin brother, that becomes much more difficult to do: both of us struggle with everything from eating healthily to hair loss to the challenges of raising small children. I think we both hope that that is useful for our viewers and listeners: we have the same problems they do and I’m not trying to sell anyone a miracle cure!

How do you like to spend your time away from your careers?

Family is our main hobby! Chris has three small children and Xand has two children with a third on the way. Almost all our free time away from work is spent with them along with our wives and quite often our parents and our younger brother and his family. They’re very much in our lives and a part of everything we do.

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