Interview: Dr Chris Van Tulleken on OPERATION OUCH! QUEST FOR THE JURASSIC FART! at the Southbank Centre

Operation Ouch has never been afraid of diving into the strange, messy and marvellously human parts of science. Yet its latest stage adventure, Operation Ouch: Quest for the Jurassic Fart!, takes audiences further than ever before. Landing at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall for a strictly limited festive season until 2 January 2026, the show promises lasers, time travel, dinosaurs and a mission to recreate the world’s most ancient fart.

Ahead of the run, BroadwayWorld sat down with Dr Chris van Tulleken for an unfiltered, hilarious and unexpectedly heartfelt conversation about creating the show, working with his twin Dr Xand, inspiring young scientists and the profound importance of embarrassment. 

Operation Ouch! has never shied away from the weird and wonderful parts of the human body, but Quest for the Jurassic Fart feels like a new frontier. Can you tell me about the show?

This is the first show where not just us, but the entire audience does a little bit of time travel. There's some genetic engineering mainly by me, as Dr Xand wrote the show. And so what that means, is that it is Dr Chris who is generally the victim or the guinea pig! For all the experiments the original idea for this particular show came from the quest for the Golden Poo previously, but it turns out that there are real farts fossilised in amber from a very long time ago, from many, many millions of years ago, and so Xand had the idea if we could get some dinosaur blood and some poop from a dinosaur poop which would be fossilised on flies in amber, we could create a dinosaur fart and this is the quest we're on, to present a dinosaur fart at the world's most important scientific conference.

We go on this journey and there are lasers, explosions, dinosaurs, farts. We look inside Xand's head with a very special live camera. You've got a live view of inside the head that you have never seen before in your life. Even if you're a doctor, you will never have seen this view.

There's a big scientific journey that we hope will allow the audience to understand, what happens when they eat, why food goes in one end and comes out in a very different form the other end and how they build their bodies. Why farts are nothing to be ashamed of, we're confronting our own embarrassment.

So Dr Chris, my character is a very embarrassed character. Operation Ouch is quite an embarrassing show. An embarrassment is the emotion that shapes children's lives almost more than any other, so we counter that in good ways. Your kids will leave the show a little bit calmer and with a greater emotional capacity.

How long did it take before you and Xand agreed that Jurassic Fart was an acceptable show title, was it instant enthusiasm or a heated scientific debate?

If it was up to (the character of) Doctor Chris, the show would just be a lecture on gastrointestinal Physiology with a discussion on how many vegetables are collected. And so it is Dr Xand who is the one saying we need to have dinosaurs, time travel and explosions. So yeah, there was a very easy argument.

You’ve conquered Australia and London’s West End with previous Operation Ouch! tours. What makes this new adventure bigger, bolder or simply smellier?

No spoilers, but there may be a dinosaur on stage. The time travel is pretty new, there are going to be some lasers which are new. And it's quite participatory. We may have equipment that allows us to collect and analyse farts from the audience, and we've never set fire to anything on stage before, so that's new.

The show promises new crazy experiments. Can you tease one that made even you think, “Is this going too far?”

In the show, (my character) thinks the whole show goes too far. You know, I'm deeply embarrassed by the whole thing, but it seems to go down well with the audience, so it we we do push it. More or less as far as we can, the joy of the show really is, we know that when when families come to the West End at Christmas that they they they don't just want a science lecture. I mean obviously some of some people in the audience are real Dr Chris fans and they just want a science lecture. 

The thing is to get the kids to use a bit of energy, a lot of screaming and engagement and then moments of real quiet reflection and consideration as well. And that's the fun thing about the live show is building it up and then getting it almost to the brink of chaos and then bringing it back. And I think we've got fairly good at that over the years. Just trying to get them screaming as loud as they possibly can. And then and then all super calm by the time they leave.

How do you strike the balance between comedy and genuine science when designing a family show?

I think the real science can be very funny. I don't think we think of the show as being a science joke, the science is is the funny bit. The science farts are funny and we're doing the science to farts and the idea that you're all breathing the thing that the gas that's keeping us alive is, is bacterial. Fart gas is inherently funny and very scientifically complicated and sophisticated. So I think we we try and get the humour out of the science and get the science into the humour.

You’ve both worked together for years across television, podcasts and stage. What is something audiences don’t know about working with your twin on a live show?

I think if people watch Operation Ouch, they know exactly what it's like working with your twin. So what they will see is Doctor Chris being frustrated at every turn by Doctor Xand just trying to make everything funny and chaotic and having grand plans and needing to execute them behind Chris's back. We love working with each other, but we also fight like when we were 10 years old. We've never really grown out of that.

Operation Ouch! has inspired a whole generation of mini scientists. What do you think kids respond to most in your approach?

We don't dumb stuff down so you're going to learn something, so we we try and put in enough science that know every single person in the audience, whether they have, you know, they're a professor of science or that there are, there are a younger sibling of someone who watches the show. They will learn, learn something new about science they didn't know.

For young audience members attending their first ever science show, what do you hope they take away, besides a lingering question about dinosaur digestion?

If a child leaves feeling that their world is a little larger and they have more opportunities and that their horizons have have expanded in some way, then I think we've done a good job. My entire abdomen is removed at one point and a child might be inspired into all kinds of different careers, including magic. If kids see grown-ups joking around and and doing fart science and humiliating each other and and messing things up them kids feel a bit a bit safer to not be humiliated if they go wrong that that's a really big thing. There are many, many things in the show that go wrong for for Chris and Xand and everything's fine in the end.

Peter Adams is directing and Richard Dinnen is designing this new production. What was the wildest idea they brought to the table that actually made it into the show?

The machine where we take the genetic material out of the mosquito from the dinosaur and we take the bacteria from a family that's trodden for fossilised fly that's trodden in dinosaur poo, and we combine the genes and the poo inside the body and do the final experiment to win the prize and that that machine is very sophisticated, although it goes very badly wrong and injuries me well it that's the machine that ends up cutting me in half. But it's still it's a good effort, even if it's very disgusting in the end.