Casualty: an oral history by its stars and creators

Wanting to fill the medical drama gap left by Angels, the BBC had two ideas for a hospital drama – a ‘cottage hospital’ idea, which was seen as the ‘safer’ option, or an A&E department drama. The Beeb ultimately went with Casualty – but how did such a risqué idea get off the ground in the first place?

Jeremy Brock (co-creator and writer, 1986-2021): “I was working at the BBC, Paul was running the Bristol Old Vic Theatre. Paul and I had been at uni together, and we both had experience of being in hospital for various reasons.”

Paul Unwin (co-creator and writer, 1986-2017): “We thought about doing something about an accident emergency department before you saw that memo. I think I remember you saying, “Oh my God, there’s such a coincidence here. We’ve been talking about doing something like–” We were really inspired by an American TV show called Hill Street Blues, which was very political and funky and direct. So we thought, “Oh, we’ll do that.”

Jeremy Brock: “I can’t remember which came first. What I do remember is the two of us sitting down, and saying, “Look, we’ve both been in hospital. We’ve both had quite some experience at a relatively early age of how incredible the NHS can be.” We loved Hill Street Blues, and we loved MASH. And we had very little experience first-hand of A&E, but we knew there was something in that.”

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derek thompson as charlie fairhead, cathy shipton as duffy, casualty

BBC
Paul Unwin: “I think what also strikes me is that I had very little experience of A&E, and absolutely no experience of writing television drama. We had worked together in the theatre. Jem is a playwright, and I was directing an early play of his but we’d known each other for quite a while at that point. We had these specific ideas that it would be through the night. It would be a group of characters of the nursing medical staff and the focus of the drama would be much more on reality than on the slightly schmaltzy version that we’d seen on TV. Television had always portrayed nurses and doctors as being these unblemished heroes. But I had spent five months in hospital. I’d seen it close-up. I just thought that these people are amazing – it’s an incredible duress for them and their individual lives.”

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Jeremy Unwin: “It was a two-page manifesto, completely under-researched, full of ambition, and full of our excitement about what we thought potentially we could do with a through-the-night drama. And we had certain ground rules, didn’t we? We said the doors opens, and that’s when the story starts, and then when the doors close, it ends. So in the very earliest imagining of the series, we didn’t imagine you ever left. Obviously that got adapted and altered according to what was pragmatic and realistic. We also did lots and lots of research. We went to the Bristol Royal Infirmary and latched onto the most wonderful, wonderful staff nurse called Peter Salt.”

Finding Charlie and Duffy
Paul Unwin: “Discovering Peter was like finding our Charlie and finding the lynchpin and the rock for us. We didn’t know how the television drama side of it worked, and nor did we have much experience of hospitals – what he did was so crucial. Peter is such a hero to us because he understood how our energy works.

“He never patronised us. He always treated every idea, however absurd it might be in reality, with great dignity. We were 25 and he just drew us into his circle of trust, and never made us feel like we were talking rubbish. He understood our ambition to try to portray the NHS as a frontline. Which, of course, ironically, given what’s happened in the last year-and-a-half, it so dramatically is.”

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Derek Thompson (Charlie Fairhead, 1985-2024): “Peter was always the maypole that the ideas dance around – he is a genuine charge nurse. They based the character on him and I met him.”

cathy shipton as duffy on her wedding day, casualty

BBC
Paul Unwin: “Peter then went on and stayed with the show. When he left, which I think was about four years ago, he had read and noted and developed and made medically sound every episode for 30 years. He went on being a nurse, and then he became a magistrate.”

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Derek Thompson: “At the time, I thought: ‘Wow, what a get out of jail card!’ Because if ever I look at a piece of script and think ‘I’m not sure that’s him’, I say: ‘Go and ask Peter Salt about that’.”

Paul Unwin: “I stayed friends with Peter for all kinds of reasons – nothing much to do with Casualty. Just because I was in Bristol. At one point, they were developing two scripts simultaneously, one that was going to get made, and one that was going to go further forwards and he was reading basically two scripts a week for 30 years but he had the same magnitude of care and consideration.”

Cathy Shipton (Duffy, 1986-2020): “At the beginning, everybody spoke RP or wherever they came from, but the two youngest and least experienced TV actors – Debbie Roza and myself – were picked to be local girls. So I sounded like Worzel Gummidge most of the time! Then the producer changed. Peter Norris took over, who’s actually producing Line of Duty now. It was around the time when he was working with Antonia Bird. They wanted to make the show less localised to Bristol and they also wanted it to be grittier and more urban. As the timeslot went later, they were trying to create that urban feel.”

Derek Thompson: “One of my favourite outdoor moments was one of the establishing moments in Casualty’s very first episode. Charlie drives his little yellow Beetle across the suspension bridge in Bristol up to the hospital and gets out wearing his flying jacket and lights up a cigarette. It felt wonderful to me because it was so humorous; there was all these hard-man symbols but then with a little yellow Beetle!”

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Controversy
Casualty is something of a national institution these days, but believe it or not, there was once a time where the writers feared it wouldn’t make it past the first series. The first series of Casualty attracted a lot of political controversy and government condemnation due to its negative portrayal of the NHS, with the Royal College of Nursing, who did not like the way the nurses were portrayed. Despite these initial concerns, a second season of episodes was commissioned, but it was generally thought that no more would be made after that.

derek thompson as charlie fairhead, cathy shipton as duffy, casualty

BBC
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Paul Unwin: “Back at the start, there had been this thing where Edwina Currie, who was an MP then, had stood up in the House of Commons, and said, ‘The BBC is making a political, anti-NHS drama’. It was all over the Sunday Times. We thought, ‘Oh, that’s it, then. We are toast.’ In fact, the reverse happened.”

Jeremy Brock: “We loved the whole Edwina Currie story. We were young enough and arrogant enough and ambitious enough to find all that publicity absolutely delicious. I remember, we just loved every minute of it.”

Paul Unwin: “During the first series, Jem and I were slightly summoned to go to this Royal College of Nursing conference in Nuneaton. We were quite nervous because there’d been in the newspaper stuff saying, “These people are dissing our nursing staff,” and all that. Peter came with us and we knew with him there that we had one of theirs on our side. There was this moment where we were on this panel and facing a room of quite irritated nurses – senior nurses. Someone said, ‘Please raise your hand if you’ve never heard of a member of the nursing staff drinking or taking drugs or being promiscuous?’

“But that question made it impossible. Everyone put their hand up but then Pm a member of RCN, and I have supported these guys. This show is accurate, and it’s trying to show the stress of these staff, and not to criticise them.” It was like a sea-change moment because suddenly having felt like we were the naughty boys – through Peter and through Geraint, it was suddenly like, ‘Oh, well. It’s OK. We trust you’. It was phenomenally successful early on, which was weird. I think it was about 6 million people quite quickly. It was a different world. People watched television in quite a different way.”

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Jeremy Brock: “We’ve got to bear in mind that we were pushing at something which the BBC weren’t comfortable with. Like Paul said, the normal kind of way in which a drama about nurses would have been made, would have been Angels, or there was one in the ’60s – I can’t remember. But there was a recipe. There was a way you did it. There was a little bit of a serial element, and there was a little bit of drama. But by and large, nobody did or said anything too controversial.

“I can remember Geraint, our producer, convinced us that we weren’t going to get through to series two. But by the end of series two, we were getting the sort of viewing figures that they couldn’t argue with. So it was saved. But we didn’t feel safe at all in that first year. We just felt excited. We were prepared to push it, and go for it as much as we could.”

Simon Harper (executive producer, 2017-2020): “It had quite a crusading nature to it. I hesitate to say that it’s political, because obviously when you make a BBC show, you can’t be politically partisan. It’s not political if it shows things that are undeniable. You’ve got to tell what’s happening in the NHS. So if the NHS is underfunded, and it’s over-stretched, then you show that. I don’t think it’s a political statement to say that, because it’s a sort of undeniable truth.”

Cathy Shipton: “For me, my taste is for Casualty to be political with a small ‘p’. It can still be issue-based. Even if you look at the Huntington’s Disease storyline with Carol Royle, George Rainsford and Richard Winsor. I call that ‘political’, because it’s exploring social politics. It’s about caring, palliative care, end of life and terminal illness. I think it’s great when Casualty gets stuck into an issue like that. There was also a storyline focusing on an FGM issue. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be junior doctors shouting at Jeremy Hunt or whoever else is up there.”

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From series to serial
Although it’s famous for its standard Saturday night slot, there was a period between the late ’80s and early ’90s where Casualty switched to Fridays. While the early series approximately consisted of between 10 -15 episodes, the series length was extended to 24 episodes per year when it moved back to its Saturday night schedule in 1992. By 2005, the show had transitioned from a traditional seasonal format (which had progressed from three months in its early years to around seven months by 2001) to an almost year-round production and transmission.

From series 26, which kicked off in the summer of 2011, the show also began broadcasting in August of their respective years, rather than at the start of September with a two-week break in late December. The long summer break, between each series, has now been scrapped entirely.

Derek Thompson: “In the early days we did 13 episodes per series, then 10 episodes, then 15 episodes, then it built up. Now we’re doing anything between 42 and 48 episodes per series and people expect that long graft, with the storylines that are the ‘soap opera’ element. These days, that aspect of the show is actually much gentler. You’d expect it to be fiercer, but it’s actually much gentler because in the early days, you had to hit people with a big storyline within 13 episodes. You had to get to the end – or at least the thick middle bit – within those 13 episodes. These days, you can set up the far pavilions in episode one and you don’t have to get there until episode 32. It’s a very different show to the one that had the 13-episode format.”

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Oliver Kent (researcher, script editor 1999-2011, series producer 2006-2011, executive producer 2013-2017): “I didn’t find it [the episode increase] made much difference, but that’s probably partly because the time in between me being at Casualty the first time and coming back, I’d spent my time on three different long-running dramas. So there was EastEnders, Holby City and a radio drama called Westway.

“I’d become very used to shows that ran year-round. And I think pretty much everybody had taken it in their stride. Some will tell you differently, but I didn’t find that it was crazily more difficult.”

Cathy Shipton: “When it first started, it was always felt that the individual episodes should be able to stand alone. Myself and Derek just did this Gogglebox format for iPlayer and watched 14 clips of Casualty history over the 30 years. The earlier ones were just so crisp. It was great. Yes the sets looked less impressive but the standard of the episodes was great.”

New era, new faces
By 2007 things had rapidly changed. Many of the show’s original cast had left, with the exception of Charlie. As a result, the show then underwent somewhat of a subtle overhaul, birthing a new wave of memorable characters. Series 22, which began on 8th September 2007, saw the arrival of many new characters, including Ruth Winters (Georgia Taylor) and Toby De Silva (Matthew Needham), consultants Adam Trueman (Tristan Gemmill) and Zoe Hanna (Sunetra Sarker), Big Mac (Charles Dale), Receptionist Noel Garcia (Tony Marshall), and many more.

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georgia taylor as ruth, casualty

BBC
Georgia Taylor (Ruth Winter, 2008-2011): “There was a huge influx of new people. We all joined within about six months of each other. It almost was like a complete turnover of cast in that first year. I think a lot of people had just left in the last series and so it was all new people. We were a really tight, little team. I think of the regular cast, it was maybe 14, 15. It’s not like a soap where you’ve got 60, 70 people. I’ve still got really close friends from that job to this day. It was an exciting time.”

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Sunetra Sarker (Zoe Hanna, 2008-2018): “I remember going and having to deliver a huge long medical life-saving speech and not having a clue whether I was pronouncing the medical words right. The casting director Ben Cogan was so helpful and made me feel like I had a friend in the room as the series producer and another producer was in the room with us.

“I also remember really enjoying the feeling when I left the room, like I knew I had done my best and so I wouldn’t mind if I didn’t get it. But when I got the phone call to say I got the job, I remember I yelped out loud on the train! A few strange looks from passengers but I really couldn’t believe it. Three years was a big contract even back then.

“Zoe was a great character to play and the writers had a field day with her chaotic lifestyle and lack of self care! She fell over toilet cubicles, got engaged to numerous consultants, lied to management, performed operations in unorthodox ways and smoked cigarettes outside next to the ambulances!” Her opening story of arriving as the mistress of a consultant whose wife was Jessica (a nurse on the show) was a great intro to the car crash world of Zoe. I loved being the other woman and not playing a cuddly doctor who loved kids, and then she found out she was sort of quite liked by kids when Sharice – a child patient – ended up needing fostering and Zoe stepped up.”

Suzanne Packer [Tess Bateman, 2003 – 2015]: “I was visiting from New York as I was living there at the time, and my agent asked if I wanted to be seen for Tess. She was a character I knew I could fall into immediately as I had been around nurses all my life and so I identified with her high standards and professional competence. It was at a time when I really wanted to come back to the UK so the timing couldn’t have been better.

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“I had worked with Foz Allan before, who was the Series Producer at the time, and we were friends, so he said to come for lunch at the warehouse in Bristol first so we could catch up and then I had the audition afterwards. It was filmed and I remember it was the good old days when you didn’t have to have it learnt but be familiar enough with the lines so you could look up and engage with the casting director who was reading the lines off camera. It was a very relaxed audition. Within a few hours of arriving back in Cardiff I was offered the job.”

Wanting to fill the medical drama gap left by Angels, the BBC had two ideas for a hospital drama – a ‘cottage hospital’ idea, which was seen as the ‘safer’ option, or an A&E department drama. The Beeb ultimately went with Casualty – but how did such a risqué idea get off the ground in…