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Series two of A Young Doctor’s Notebook begins this week.

• 2100, Thursday 21 Nov, Sky Arts

Good news for those who don’t own a squarial: A Young Doctor’s Notebook is available today on DVD from BBC Worldwide and Big Talk.

• A Young Doctor’s Notebook: From the operating table to the screen

A piece for the Guardian about A Young Doctor’s Notebook: how we adapted the short stories for the screen and why Daniel Radcliffe and Jon Hamm are playing the same nameless doctor:

Our focus was the emotional core of the hospital tales: the hardening of the junior medic. In Bulgakov’s book, in interior monologue, the young doctor wonders how a more experienced practitioner might react, wishing he had the composure of his future self. But as the story Morphine warns us, that older self may not be wiser; he might, in fact, be a junkie. We wanted to incorporate that story: on screen, the older doctor (Hamm) is right there for the younger (Radcliffe) to talk to; but he turns out to be a damaged man: nostalgic, regretful, not above the occasional pratfall.

An extra treat in the past week has been seeing Hugh Aplin’s and Michael Glenny’s translations now sporting AS SEEN ON TV labels

Mark Chappell in the office where we wrote AYDN

In the design department

Shaun Pye relaxing on set

Models for the hospital set

‘The cultured miller’ asks YD for a diagnosis

• A Young Doctor’s Notebook, 9pm, Thursdays from 6 December; Sky Arts
• Daniel Radcliffe and Jon Hamm discuss the series
• Trailer
• NTV news package

I am working on an adaptation of Mikhaíl Bulgakov’s Записки юного врача for Big Talk and Point West Picures, as A Young Doctor’s Notebook. It is part of Playhouse Presents….

The writers are Mark Chappell, me and Shaun Pye and the medium is comedy-drama. It’s set in 1917; while some press has inferred that the background is the first world war or the Russian revolution, the setting is in fact snow. Lots of snow.

More details in the Guardian…

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe and Mad Men’s Jon Hamm [will] play the same doctor at different stages of his life in the four-part series, A Young Doctor’s Notebook, by Russian writer and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov.

Hamm will play the older man, who has a series of ‘bleakly comic’ exchanges with his younger self, played by Radcliffe.

…and I am sad that Variety’s piece includes no puns or jargon.

• Fallen Tree on Flickr