Casualty

Casualty started in 1986 and was a brilliant show about the working lives of Holby City Accident & Emergency Department doctors and nurses. In my opinion, from 1986 to about 1999 it was consistently good drama. It was very realistic at times and showed us the bad side of Britain's National Health Service and the politics that governed it.

Casualty always provided entertainment. The main problem is, how do you continually top things? How do you push that envelope? Casualty has had plane crashes, train crashes, diseases, NHS cutbacks etc. In a way, the current series of Casualty are not as good. They have become victims of their own success. Perhaps they should have saved the bangs for later.

One criticism I do have of Casualty's later years is the focus on the staff's private lives. I do like to get a little glimpse of the doctors and nurses private lives but sometimes they overdo it (The Bill does the same and London's Burning too). If Casualty is to keep me as a viewer, then it will have to tone back on the private lives of the staff and focus more on the job itself. And it needs to stop axing popular characters. All characters run their course eventually but these last few years, Casualty has had a habit of axing characters before they've even been given a chance.

If it can try to focus more on the job and think before axing characters, then Casualty has a great future.

This programme started as a superb mould-breaking drama. Each episode was an exciting thrill-ride. Now it is just a silly soap.

What made this prog so special was precisely that it was not a soap. Each week we had a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people who found themselves in the A&E department because of the accidents or illnesses that befell them. Each episode presented a whole series of accidents - from the bizarre to the mundane. As we were introduced to the casualties, we wondered how they had come to be there and how would their lives be affected by its new turn. Would they live, die or be left crippled. Would their infidelities and indiscretions be unveiled. By the end of the episode we had a snapshot of their lives.

In the late '90s Auntie Beeb threatened to turn Casualty into a twice-weekly soap. In the face of an outcry they back-peddled on this and adopted the compromise of starting a new weekday drama set in the same hospital and "Holby City" was born.

Unfortunately the script-writing team seem to have missed the point of the objection: casualty is not a soap. They have turned into a soap anyway.

Now the series simply has an interminable and tedious focus on the increasingly implausible private lives of the permanent staff. Each episode focuses on one character. And now we even have that stalwart of the soap genre - the token gay. Toby does not work in this guise for me! We now seem lucky if a single accident occurs in an episode. Instead it is the hapless staff of the "ED" who have the illness and injuries. It is the department team who have their indiscretions exposed.

It is to be hoped that this programme will return to its roots. Otherwise it needs to be pensioned off.

JDD - 14 December 2008

Fantastic series - I was always a great fan but the early part of each show, where they set up each of the story lines, used to worry me somewhat! As you can imagine, the show was centered around Holby City Hospital and the scenes were being set so you KNEW that the 'normal' people going about their 'normal' lives in 'normal' situations were about to experience something fairy dreadful to warrant their inclusion in the show and their appearance in the A&E (UK) or the ER (US) with any manner of tubes and machines beeping and blipping their lives away. Consistently superb storylines and great acting (don't you love 'Charlie!) made this compulsive viewing.

A great show in its day, unfortunately it's been dragged out far to long and has now become boring with absolutely pathetic storylines it's time to wrap it up.

Casualty is good entertainment and drama for a Saturday evening, the show is always well directed. The script isn't always top notch but the writers do their best and the writing is usually of a very high standard which compliments the good job the directors on Casualty and such shows do. The show is centred around the "Accident and Emergency" department of Holby City general hospital and focuses on both the personal and working lives of the patients and the staff who go there. I would recommend this show to anybody looking for some good drama for their Saturday evenings infront of the tele, if however you prefer full on entertainment on a Saturday without the drama bit then this show may not be for you.