Perfect dose of escapism
WE LIVE in fraught times and as such one of the great sources of comfort in life is CASUALTY (BBC1, Saturday). Yes, the emergency ward may be full of nutters yelling at the doctors and nurses trying to save them amid scenes of blood and gore that must have tested the resources of the make-up department, but hey.
You know where you are with Casualty. As the oldest medical TV drama in the world it’s been running for 31 years now, providing utter escapism with a ward peopled by medical geniuses who can see into their patients’ souls.
Saturday’s episode was the culmination of a two-parter, with Casualty suffering a touch of the EastEnders, courtesy of the Ellison family, whose matriarch would fit right into Albert Square.
Her idiot son Scott, having fallen over the balcony of a flight of stairs following a fit of homophobic rage, was strapped to a gurney and fitted with all manner of movement-impeding machinery, which didn’t stop him from taunting Ethan about the fact that he had murdered his brother Cal.
Ethan didn’t do what most of us would have wanted to do in the circumstances – turn off the life-saving equipment – but he stood by as Scott choked to death.
Ma Ellison, on discovering that yet another member of her family had gone to that great emergency ward in the sky, delivered a full-on audition for an EastEnders role with much weeping and wailing.
Good riddance to Scott, not least as he was turning into a cliché, following the homophobia with a bit of racism as he breathed his last.
More interesting was the other story. Maya, a woman who proved that no good deed goes unpunished when she gave a large donation to a beggar who was falsely claiming to be legless, was knocked down by said beggar and ended up with corrosive cleaning acid in her eye.
Both she and the beggar ended up in emergency, at which point it turned out that Maya’s philanthropy might actually have been prompted by guilt.
Those insightful doctors did indeed peer straight into her soul and extracted a confession that she had accidentally killed her best friend in a car. It took about three questions to get to this deeply hidden secret, but no matter.
It’s not often you get a medic who combines stethoscope skills with the wisdom of Solomon but then again it’s not often you find a medical drama that’s into its fourth decade. And may there be many more.
Casualty has just been in the news for another reason – two of its cast members have featured in the BBC mega-pay list. They are Derek Thompson, who has played nurse Charlie Fairhead since 1986 and who is in the £350,000-£399,999 pay bracket (his real life counterparts may have something to say about that) and Amanda Mealing, aka Connie Beauchamp, on £250,000£299,999.
Personally I’d rather cough up for those two than Chris Evans but it’s a relief to see that the BBC is spending licence payers’ money on something more worthwhile as well.
By its nature – the clue is in the title – there were no preview tapes for WILD ALASKA LIVE (BBC1, Sunday) so I can only critique the idea rather than the result but these groundbreaking nature programmes are an example of Mother Nature at her best.
Forget the grotesquely overpaid presenters and admire the scenery. Awesome, no less.