Operation Ouch! Live: Quest For The Jurassic Fart sees Dr Xand and Dr Chris return to Riverside Theatre Perth

English brothers Dr Xand and Dr Chris van Tulleken are defying the odds when it comes to career longevity in children’s television. The Operation Ouch! presenters have discovered the incredible advancements in medicine only the past decade are not only good for patients — they have kept them creating new content for our television screens too. “In children’s television, unsurprisingly, you don’t tend to make that much of it, because if people watch kids’ TV from the age of, say, five to 10 even, 150 episodes of anything is quite a lot,” Dr Xand says from his home in the East Sussex countryside. “The thing about Operation Ouch!, and we’re starting to make series 14 this year, is that the science changes so quickly . . . There’s so much new science that if we look at an episode from 10 years ago, it’s not that it was wrong, it’s just out of date. “The other thing is that we’ve really put kids at the heart of the show much more. “It used to be me and Chris telling the viewers what we thought. Now the kids who are in the show really tell their own stories in a way that I think is very different and sets a really different tone for the way that we should think about everyone’s health. “It should all be patient-centred. So we’re sort of still learning as we go and there are a few slightly more challenging topics we haven’t done yet, around death, dementia and ageing, that we still want to do.” Growing up in West London, the van Tulleken twins — Dr Xand is older by seven minutes — loved science, both deciding to put their fascination to good use by studying medicine at Oxford University. Despite the growing demands of both Operation Ouch! and fatherhood, Dr Xand works in public health medicine at the University of London, with a background in infectious diseases and tropical medicines, while Dr Chris still sees patients as a doctor in the National Health Service. “When we knew that the BBC was interested in doing something around health for kids, we wanted to be involved because we would have loved that when we were kids,” Dr Xand says, who is dad to 15-year-old Julian and seven-month-old Rex. “The initial conversations were about making the show we would have wanted to watch when we were the age of the Ouch viewers. “The show relied on us being siblings, mostly because then you can mess around. Health is quite a serious, complicated subject, but if you’re doing stuff with your family, then no matter how old you are, you always act like a child when you’re with your siblings. “It was quite nice to have that silliness that comes from the fact we’re brothers.” It was always a no-brainer they would have specific scrubs — Dr Xand green and Dr Chris blue — given their parents, like most with twins, gave them these same coloured-coded clothes as children. Operation Ouch! has since branched out to television specials, podcasts and live shows that have seen them tour to Australia on four occasions, adding a fifth live show tour in January 2025 — Operation Ouch! Live: Quest For The Jurassic Fart. The show was inspired by their late Australian psychologist friend Professor Felicia Huppert who, after bringing her grandchildren to a previous Sydney season, suggested they centred their next show on the world’s oldest fart. “She got up a newspaper article about this fart that was trapped in amber from a mosquito, from the dinosaur era, and said ‘Look at this, it’s the oldest fart in the world. I think kids would love that’,” Dr Xand says. “That just instantly sparked with us because we talk about gut health, and we talk about diet, and we talk about different kinds of animals . . . Like lots of Operation Ouch!, it has a mixture of silliness and ridiculousness, but also a kind of extraordinary true thing that was given to us by an amazing Australian scientist. “Unfortunately, she’s passed away, so she won’t see the show, but she did know that we were using the idea, and her grandchildren will be coming along.” While dinosaurs and flatulence sound like a winning combination for educational laughs, Dr Xand remains at a scientific loss as to why the latter provides such amusing entertainment value. “I don’t have a perfect answer, but there does seem to be, in every culture in the world, something quite humorous about it,” he admits. “And once you’re a doctor, bowel sounds and all these noises become terribly important, sort of diagnostically, you’re very interested in them for people’s health. So it goes from being funny to sort of being your everyday life and quite important. You want to hear the gas moving through.” Operation Ouch! Live: Quest For The Jurassic Fart is at Riverside Theatre, 1pm, 4pm, and 6.30pm, January 28, tickets at premier.ticketek.com.au.