A perfect farewell for dear old Charlie Fairhead
Somebody call 999 because I feel severely discombobulated. Charlie Fairhead, a fixture on medical drama Casualty (BBC One) since its inception in 1986, has finally hung up his scrubs and stethoscope. It’s the televisual equivalent of the ravens leaving the Tower. If Ken Barlow departs Coronation Street’s
cobbles, we’re really in trouble.
Actor Derek Thompson has been putting in shifts at Holby City Hospital’s A&E department for a whopping 38 years, making him the medical soap’s last remaining original cast member. In the list of longestserving characters on British TV, he’s beaten only by a few of Corrie’s old guard, while sitting just ahead of Emmerdale’s Eric Pollard and Ian Beale from Eastenders.
A special instalment titled “Charlie” (what else?) saw our hero’s life hanging in the balance after being stabbed by a patient. Could Dr Stevie Nash (Elinor Lawless) regain her confidence in time to save him?
The usual glove-snapping, monitorbeeping, jargon-spouting action was intercut with flashbacks to a freshfaced Charlie (Jack Franklin) as a rookie nurse during the Eighties.
In a neat twist, we saw Charlie meeting young Stevie and inspiring her career in medicine.
It also happened to be the retirement day of his mentor Shirley (the reliably brilliant Annette Badland). When she died at the end of her final shift, was it a portent that Charlie was about to do likewise? They teased us for a tense half-hour but he pulled through and decided to quit while he was ahead.
As Charlie handed in his lanyard and took one last misty-eyed look around the bustling emergency ward, a rollcall of familiar faces returned to say a fond farewell. Duffy! Ash! Baz! Josh! Possibly others I missed due to something in my eye! He drove off into the sunset in his surprise retirement gift, a vintage yellow VW Beetle – the same car he had back in 1986. “It’s a bit old and knackered but aren’t we all?” said Josh (Ian Bleasdale).
It was a typically understated performance from the unerringly excellent Thompson, now 75. No big speeches, just crumpled, careworn and full of heart. That’s what three decades working in the NHS will do for you. Michael Hogan
The notion of children experiencing a “sugar rush” has been debunked by scientists, who concluded that the manic hyperactivity seen at birthday parties is simply excitement at being allowed to jump on a bouncy castle for two hours while eating chocolate fingers and hitting each other with balloons. Having watched Paloma Faith and Jodie Whittaker in The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up to Cancer (Channel 4), though, I’m not so sure.
Perhaps they were secretly mainlining cookie dough or inhaling the clouds of icing sugar, because the pair of them bombed around the Bake Off tent like gleeful five-year-olds. Tasked with producing cake pops (lollipops created by mushing sponge cake and buttercream), Faith made the poo emoji. Whittaker broke the bowl on her mixer and ran away screaming. Whittaker’s entry for the showstopper challenge was kind of great though: the bakers had to create portraits of judges Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood, and Whittaker made iced party rings to recreate Prue’s glasses. “It’s a bit childish,” concluded Leith, but it was fun.
The two other contestants were ex-made in Chelsea star Spencer Matthews and comedian Munya Chawawa. The former took the competition quite seriously and produced some elegant bakes. Chawawa was cheerfully hopeless. “Who is who?” asked Leith, staring at the portraits drawn onto a shortbread biscuit. “Paul is the one with the Afro and buck teeth,” replied Chawawa. “True art is flawed.”
Unlike Celebrity Big Brother, which has so many non-entities this year that their own mothers probably struggle to pick them out of a line-up, the celebrity edition of Bake Off tends to attract some contestants you actually recognise. The opening montage promises that this series will deliver Danny Dyer, Mel B, Dermot O’leary and Gabby Logan, all of whom I can identify without resorting to Google.
And, in the midst of all this larking about, the programme featured a short film in which a young woman described losing her husband at the age of 33. He was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer of the oesophagus and died five months later – a father of four, the youngest of them just a baby. A sobering reminder of the reason behind the show. Anita Singh
Casualty ★★★★★
The Great Celebrity Bake Off ★★★