Casualty: Ruth’s back! Charlie’s back! Mads is in danger!

(Series 25, Ep.36) If and when Charlie Fairhead ever dies, it will be necessary to have him stuffed and mounted in a glass case in the reception area of Holby City A&E department. Yes, it might freak out the patients a little bit, but it’s unthinkable that the place could run without him.

Having been ousted to the sunny heights of the Psych Ward for the duration of Dr Ruth Winters’ psychiatric illness (handy, that), Nick Jordan decided that, now Ruth was back, Charlie really ought to be back as well. Thus everyone will get the benefit of his uncanny ability to be reassuring while not making eye contact with the person he’s talking to (his eyes always seem to be watching an imaginary cricket match in the distance), and he’ll also be on hand to restrain Ruth if she goes off on one again. It’s a win-win situation.

It was a hell of a shift for Ruth to make her reintroduction to medical life. Henry (what is his job title, please? He’s sort of in charge when Hanssen is unavailable) had signed up to some scheme whereby Holby would alternate GP referrals with mythical “other Holby hospital” St James’s, but this had gone wrong so the ED was full of people who should really be at the other side of Holby. Mayhem. Throw in a deaf boy who’d swallowed a particularly vicious weedkiller, Henry’s daughter who’d been run over by a motorbike because she’s going blind and she hadn’t seen it coming, Adam being angsty (is this “again” or “still”?) and Mads asking if she could avoid contact with youngish male patients because her fiance was a bit traditional that way (Tess’s answer: “No.”), and you have a recipe for stress.   

Casualty: It’s not what you’ve got, it’s who you are

(Series 25, Ep.32) So who’s the best clinical lead? Is it Nick Jordan, all designer suits, snappy put-downs and brusque, no-nonsense bedside manner? Or the warm, motherly Miriam Turner, who’ll go with you for your medical appointments and put £50 behind the bar on a night out?

I like both of them, but which one should get the job, if there’s only one job? There’s only one way to find out – vote. Yup, Henry and Hanssen decreed that what was needed was a staff popularity contest, with the winner being decided by secret ballot. The ways of the NHS (Holby-style) are many and mysterious indeed.

You could never accuse Nick Jordan of pandering to public opinion or going out of his way to make himself popular – quite the reverse. “In order to win a popularity contest you have to be popular,” Dr Zoe Hanna advised him, but even with hs job apparently on the line, he wasn’t going to compromise by actually being nice. So when a girl was brought into the ED with apparently all the symptoms of being very, very drunk, Nick wasn’t listening to her sister protesting that the girl hadn’t been drinking at all, and must have been drugged. His staff were cross with him. I was cross with him – we’d seen the girl’s orange juice being spiked earlier, so what was Nick playing at? It turned out that the girl’s sister was well-known to Nick for having such a severe alcohol problem that she was, in fact, dying of liver cirrhosis. And just at the point where you’ve thrown your hands in the air in despair at Nick’s lack of bedside manner, and Lenny has cast his vote in favour of Miriam, Nick manages to persuade the father of the two girls, who hasn’t spoken to his elder daughter for years, to donate part of his liver to her. A job well done in the interests of his patient, Nick Jordan-style.

And it turns out that, while a cuddly personality will take you a long way, the ED staff actually prefer the more curmudgeonly approach of Nick. He may be a tad cussed, but he also happens to be a genius, and when you’re up to your knees in blood, guts and trauma, that’s what you want.

Meanwhile, Jay was dealing with a patient with breasts.

Casualty: Is it paranoia or is it just true?

(Series 25, Ep.30) I’d love to be able to report how Lovely Staff Nurse Faldren is feeling following his surgery, but I’m afraid I can’t. You know what hospitals are like – they won’t speak to you unless you’re a relative, and I’m just a very, very concerned friend.

It can be hard separating fact from fiction, and this was very much the theme of this week’s Faldren-free episode. It started with a glimpse of a hand, a knife, blood dripping on the floor. Then we were whizzed back in time to ten hours before this happened, and introduced to a number of people the blood could have belonged to.

Most likely candidate had to be Dr Ruth Winters. She’s still in a psych ward (which looks nicer than a lot of hotels I’ve stayed in) and is so bored she’s started watching Ainsley Harriott on daytime TV. Charlie sits her down for a little chat, and suggests that, quite possibly, she’s bipolar. “If that’s how you want to play it I don’t want your help or your labels,” she tells him. So Charlie enlists the help of Ruth’s former colleague, the Frosty Brain Surgeon Woman, who, it turns out, has OCD. A shame, really , because otherwise Charlie might have had to summon my very favourite surgeon-with-OCD, Joseph from Holby. Anyway, Frosty Brain Surgeon Woman assures Ruth that it’s quite possible to be a top surgeon and be on medication.

Of course this isn’t enough to convince Ruth, because she might be paranoid but she knows when Charlie is setting her up. What does help to put her on the road to recovery is a bit of the old Dr Ruth Winters Diagnostic Genius – a fellow patient who has been exhibiting all the signs of paranoia and also fainting a lot collapses in the toilets. Ruth diagnoses Lyme Disease, and Charlie can only marvel at her plucky medical skills.

Casualty: He’s weird – does he work here?

(Series 25, Ep.28) It’s bad news, I’m afraid. Maybe you’d better sit down. Lovely Staff Nurse Faldren got the results of his ultrasound, and now I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t looked up the word “orchidectomy” the other week, because that’s exactly what he’s got to have. He spent the episode in denial, but was forced to confront the unpleasant truth when a young boy he was looking after had to face up to his own cancer rather than believe he was a superhero.  So Jay told his nan that he had to go away for a couple of weeks to help out a friend who was in a spot of bother.

Earlier on, he had thought of confiding in Ruth, and even rang her up and arranged to see her. Sadly Ruth’s medication has been ending up in the sink in her room rather than in Ruth, and she got it into her head that she and Jay were going to get back together and so she needed to sort out some furniture for their future home (which they don’t have). This involved buying six fridges with her credit card, and Ruth ending up cowering in a very pretty children’s playhouse in a snooty store.

While Ruth is being coaxed out of the playhouse and back into reality by the ever saintly Charlie, there’s a vacancy on A&E. Nick Jordan had interviewees lined up, but Miriam had a better idea – and what Miriam wants, she tends to get. So Holby was introduced to the “charms” of one Dylan Keogh (former medical student and Robin Hood merry man William Beck), who of course had to arrive by finding himself in the middle of a hideous bus crash and heroically dragging someone out of the wreckage, then making a tricky and brilliant diagnosis. He’s grumpy and eccentric and all the usual things you’d expect, really. Mads thinks he’s “weird,” so he should fit in nicely.

Next time: No Casualty next week due to some  rugby nonsense. Is that really what I pay my license fee for?

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Casualty: I think you’ll find it’s ‘our staff,’ Nicky

(Series 25, Ep.25) What’s the best way to get up the nose of a doctor who is known for being arrogant, maverick, independent and autocratic? Make him share power with someone who is similarly A, M, I and A. This was the reasoning of He Who Must Be Obeyed, Henrik Hanssen, when he decided the very thing that Nick Jordan needed in his life was a co-clinical lead. And the person he chose was Nick’s old teacher Miriam Turner (Cheryl Campbell).

Nick was not best pleased. It was like his mum had been assigned to work alongside him, and she wasn’t afraid to spit on a hankie and use it to wipe mud off his cheek, metaphorically-speaking. A typical exchange:

Miriam: “I see you haven’t got over your God complex.”

Nick: “And I see you’re still a ball-breaker with a hatred of a certain part of the male anatomy.”

Miriam: “Only small ones.” Ouch!

The two ended up in a tense stand-off when a pregnant patient who was haemorrhaging refused a blood transfusion because she was a Jehovah’s Witness. Cue medical expression of the week: Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation, as in “She’s going into DIC!” Nick felt he could respect the wishes of the patient and her husband by going the “bloodless” route, while Miriam felt that it was ok to risk getting sued and trample over a person’s religious beliefs if it meant saving their life. She pretended she’d heard the patient agree to a transfusion, and Lennie (who has faced a situation like this in the past, I seem to remember) backed her up. It was a moot point anyway, as the woman died, but thanks to Miriam’s skills as an obstetric surgeon, her baby was delivered safely by Caesarean. He needed a blood transfusion himself, though, and this time his father agreed.

Would all this end up making Nick really miserable and hating his new colleague and deeply resenting sharing an office?  Oddly enough, no. By the end of the episode Nick (“Please don’t call me Nicky”) and Miriam were sharing a soothing glass of something or other, a bit of banter and a friendly hug. Hanssen looked most aggrieved.

Meanwhile, Lovely Staff Nurse Faldren kept clutching at his groin area and wincing throughout the episode. With the full benefit of my degree in televisual medicine from Holby University I diagnosed a hernia due to lifting his nan in and out of bed. But the poor lad was googling the symptoms of testicular cancer and looking worried. And now I’m worried, too, and the sooner he gets his balls into the hands of a qualified expert, the happier I’ll be.

Ruth would also be worried if she knew, because belatedly she’s decided she’s in love with him (she’s not taking her medication either). Oh, Ruth! And, typically for her, she’s being a tad intense about it and texting him every five minutes. He asked Charlie to have a word, because he just isn’t in the right frame of mind to be dealing with Ruth as well as all his other worries.

“Worry” became Kirsty’s middle name when she married Horrible Warren. When he heard from his equally horrible mother that Kirsty and Adam were “close,” Warren rose up from his sickbed, where he’d only just woken up from a coma, and staggered off, Gollum-like, to mark Adam’s card and then give Kirsty one final thump for old times’ sake.

Next time: Kirsty finds it hard to cope after Warren’s death, and Miriam is concerned about Jay’s peculiar behaviour,

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Casualty: We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about Mary

(Series 25, Ep.23) A gruelling episode, this, as we took a journey into the damaged psyche of Dr Ruth Winters. Sectioned for her own safety, but unable to comprehend that she was ill and demanding to be released, Ruth’s care was in the hands of the ever-lovely Charlie and, somewhat bizarrely, Matthew Kelly from Stars In Their Eyes. He played consultant psychiatrist Andrew Brookfield, and it was his job to try and make Ruth, as they say on Jeremy Kyle, “accept she needs help.”

With a character who holds herself together by iron will at the best of times this was never going to be easy. I’ve mentioned lots of times before the old Casualty/Holby device of using the stories of the patients to illuminate the dilemmas and inner feelings of the regular cast members. I call it “speaking your brains” (from The Day Today), and this episode provided the clearest example of speak-your-brains yet devised – because the patient whose case revealed what was going on in Ruth’s head was actually a figment of her imagination.

Via the story of “Mary McConnell,” Ruth painted a picture of someone who was lonely, lost, ill in a way no-one understood, and crying out for someone to recognise her and understand her. Georgia Taylor is a fantastic actress, and sometimes Ruth’s pain was almost unbearable to watch.

Finally she allowed herself to watch CCTV of when she was dragged away from the ED, an incident she couldn’t previously remember. Maybe eventually she’ll be able to watch that and notice Lovely Staff Nurse Faldren pleading with the police to treat her gently and not hurt her, or maybe that’s just me being a diehard romantic again.

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Casualty: Who’s going to rein in Ruth?

(Series 25, Ep.20) Dr Ruth Winters and Dr Zoe Hanna both started their shift with a hangover. But after a coffee, a Danish and a paracetamol, Zoe was fine (she’s a seasoned veteran at this hangover business, if we’re being honest) – whereas Ruth quite obviously wasn’t. Not that she had a coffee and a Danish, but she did have some intravenous saline. There have to be some perks to being a doctor.

She seemed even less fine when a patient came in with a severed Achilles tendon. Well, that would be enough to make anyone feel queasy, never mind with a hangover. But there was more to it than that. Ruth started having flashbacks about the night before, when she’d gone on her own to a club rather than go to the pub with Tess. And Severed Tendon Man (or “Hollyoaks hunk”  and Kym Marsh other half Jamie Lomas, as we also know him) featured in the flashbacks.

What had happened? Ruth had bruises, and she was all upset and distracted. This made for an easy time for her colleagues, as she wasn’t being her usual snappy self, but Lovely Staff Nurse Faldren was worried. He tried to get advice from Nick Jordan, but Nick was busy being interviewed for (and being offered - noooooooo!!) a surgical job Upstairs. Jay tried getting Charlie’s advice – yes, good old Charlie was spotted on his way across the car park to a shift on the Psych ward.

Charlie did have time to pop Nick Jordan up for a brain scan, which showed that despite Nick getting headaches, his tumour has not returned. What a relief, and how lucky we are that reading CT scans is one of Charlie’s many specialities.

Back to Ruth, who became convinced that Tendon Man had raped her, before the truth dawned that he’d bruised her trying to fend off her amorous advances. Oh Ruth. Jay tried to offer support and sympathy, but she’s still pushing him away. Meanwhile her grip on reality is becoming ever looser. I’m thinking that Charlie may soon be welcoming an old colleague onto the Psych ward.

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Casualty: There’s no need to be horrible to Charlie when he’s only trying to help

(Series 25, Ep.11) We’ve known for a couple of weeks that Dr Ruth Winters’ husband has been in the closet – generally with handsome junior doctors. Charlie Fairhead has also known this, having opened the wrong cupboard door at the wrong time.

Ruth, however, didn’t know, but tonight she found out when she went home early to assemble a plate of sushi for her beloved, only to spot him en route to the bedroom with the aforementioned handsome doctor (who just happens to have been given the brain surgery job that Ruth had applied for – that’s got to hurt).

Charlie administered a bit of TLC as only he knows how. “I wondered whether I should have said something,” he mumbled caringly, thus revealing that he already knew. Ruth’s response was to shoot the messenger by advising Henry to relocate Charlie to somewhere where his skills would be better appreciated. Oh, Ruth – how will you be able to sleep after this heinous act of betrayal?

In other news, Jeff was reinstated after his recent suspension, and Adam and Maverick Nurse Kirsty were spotted by her daughter almost kissing when she borrowed his car. She had to borrow his car because her husband had hidden hers. He’s a funny one, that Mr Kirsty, and not in a good way.

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Casualty: Leadership qualities

Nick Jordan sent Dr Ruth Winters for a little tutorial on “leadership.” From this she learned that porters are an essential part of the team, and that essentially all you need to get a porter onside was to provide them with a plateful of sugary snacks. Actually this isn’t exactly what she learned, but what Dr Ruth Winters lacks is emotional intelligence, so the way she put her new knowledge into practice was typically cack-handed (though it did earn her a promotion to deputy to Nick Jordan).

How not to get your team on-side: (1)  implement an “employee of the month” contest, to be judged by yourself. Obviously this will only make your team at best competitive and at worst accuse you of favouritism and bias. (2) Try and stop them from going off to look for a colleague’s missing baby.

The missing baby was Charlie’s granddaughter Megan, whom Charlie is now sole carer for as her mother did a bunk and her father is Charlie’s useless son Louis who is apparently not even worthy of consideration as parent material, even by his own father. Megan had been removed from her little car seat which was parked behind the reception desk, while Mads (who was officially looking after her at that point) went off to help in resus. Luckily she was only taken by a nice kleptomaniac lady who handed her back fairly easily to Charlie.

While Charlie was looking for the baby, he had a look in a store cupboard, as you do, and who was in there? Dr Ruth Winters’ husband Edward, that’s who – snogging another man. Now we know why he’s not terribly demonstrative to Dr Ruth in the bedroom. Will Charlie say anything to Ruth?

More snogging was going on between Ruth’s former boyfriend Lovely Staff Nurse Faldren and Paramedic Polly. Polly has finally persuaded him not to keep their relationship a secret. My guess is that his reluctance to go public with it is because he is still really in love with Ruth, and once she discovers her husband has been, quite literally, in the closet, there’ll be hope for a Ruth/Jay reunion.

Nick Jordan is still worrying about his fine motor skills. This week he was timing himself taking lids off plastic drink bottles. It wasn’t going well. And there’s no Nick & Zoe watch this week, as, although Zoe was present in the episode, we hardly saw her at all.

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Casualty: Never trust a sidekick to do the job properly

(Series 25, Ep 1)  A feature-length opener to the new series (the old series having ended a mere fortnight ago), and things started with a bang. Lots of bangs, in fact, as it all revolved around a couple of oddball types going postal and shooting people semi-randomly at Holby College.  Carnage, it was.

Lenny, who’d just heard that his mother had died, went completely hyper and seemed to think he was in an episode of ER (he knows a lot about gunshot wounds, does our Lenny). A new nurse, Mads, was thrown in at the deep end having to deal with the busiest day the ED has seen in a long time while getting to grips with the assortedly weird accents of Lenny, Big Mac, Charlie and the Radiant Donna. “Where’s she from?” Mads wanted to know. “Holby,” Charlie informed her. Holby City, to be exact – Donna had been drafted in because the ED was understaffed, but also to try and persuade us that Casualty and Holby are all one big hospital. She didn’t look all that convinced herself.

It looks like Casualty is set to up the shock factor if the preview clip currently viewable here is anything to go by (warning: do not view this if you’re having your lunch, or if you’d rather not find out which members of staff are going to be getting off with each other in the near future).

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