Casualty: What’s up, doc?

(Series 27, Ep. 28) It’s lovely when Casualty goes all seasonal. The fairy lights and fake snow that signal Christmas. The hideous burns that say “Bonfire Night.” And, especially for Easter, an Easter Bunny off his face on stolen hospital drugs derailing a ghost train carrying one of Holby ED’s star junior nurses. Heartwarming.

The derailed nurse was Robyn, who was all aboard the train of fear with an old “friend,” who was one of these frenemy types who kept undermining Robyn’s career choice at every opportunity. Naturally when she ended up upside-down under a crashed ghost train carriage she was only too pleased to be in the company of a skilled and relatively unscathed mate.

Meanwhile, Tom and Sam were unravelling the complex family relationships of the funfair’s owner, his son, his secret daughter, his dead wife and his mother-in-law Anita Dobson off of EastEnders. This culminated in Tom pushing the fairground owner over (he deserved it) in a corridor and being sent home by Ash. Army Dr Sam rushed over in her annoying little car to see if Tom was ok and he had a little cry on her shoulder.

Next time: More Tom, more Sam and a “little boxing champ.”

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Casualty: Everything you need from a Casualty episode

(Series 26, Ep.5)  If we were playing Fantasy Casualty, how would the episode start? With an out-of-control vehicle, probably. What about a mobility scooter? Grumpy old man careering along the pavement, it can’t end well. A near miss with a stack of library books, a collision with a car narrowly avoided, but dodging to avoid some bikes sends him hurtling down a steep embankment towards a tree. But one casualty isn’t enough for Casualty. How’s about we throw in a tug-of-love boy and a trampoline? You know how dangerous trampolines can be. But he’s off the trampoline and he’s safe! There’s always the rope ladder…

A classic Casualty opener, then. Ambulances hurtling towards Holby City laden with a pair of  interesting and tricky cases, both of whom have a couple of twists in store.

The episode would obviously need to have a junior staff member learning valuable lessons about life and work. In this case, it was Lloyd. He learned never to judge a book by its cover, even when it’s a Kindle, and never to think that horrible old men are just being horrible because they’re old men.

There’d need to be a gory procedure, preferably one that had even Holby-hardened me covering my eyes and wincing. Drilling a hole in a patient’s skull would do nicely, particularly if it was Nick Jordan doing the drilling.

And finally, ideally you’d want a bit of romance, and to be perfect it would be Dr Ruth Winters thanking Lovely Staff Nurse Faldren for having faith in her, and him replying, “I’ve always got your back.” And the episode ending with them kissing. Sigh.

Ok, so Charlie was absent from the episode, which technically disqualifies it from being Classic Casualty. But it came pretty close.

Next time: A punch-up at a wake.

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Holby City: When is a dark secret not a dark secret?

(Series 13, Ep.42) I was all excited about this episode, because we were promised that we would find out a “dark secret” about Irish Dr Greg, when an old friend turned up. Since the loss of The World’s Most Beautiful Heart Surgeon, Joseph Byrne, to the wilds of Cumbria, I’ve been warming to Greg, with his beautiful nose and lovely accent. So the thought of a dark secret was most bracing.

So what was it, then? Has he maybe falsified his exam results so he’s not a doctor at all? No, that’s someone else I’m thinking of. Has he been snogging other male doctors in the locker room? Nope, that’s definitely not him. It wasn’t anything as exciting as that, and indeed seemed to amount to Greggy and his old mate used to play football together and probably got into a fight at some point. Frankly, I wasn’t really concentrating once I realised Greg wasn’t going to turn out to be the long lost love child of Anton Meyer.

He did go to pieces in the operating theatre, though, which was a neat turnaround as it was Sahira who had to be calm, controlled and not screaming, “Oh my GOD! I’m covered in BLOOD and STICKY BITS and that!” like she usually does. Well done, Sahira.

Meanwhile, on Keller… “Everyone’s acting weird!” says Chrissie. And she’s surprised why? The reason they were acting weird was that Dull Dan was hatching a not-so-secret plan to whisk her off somewhere fabulous for the weekend. Chrissie doesn’t like men organising her life for her, so she got all stubborn and even let her stubbornness cloud her usually acute clinical judgement. So, in another neat turnaround, Dan was right about a patient this week. All was well that ended well, and Chrissie popped into a pair of mentally high heels – just as well she had an orthopaedic surgeon on hand – and off they went for their weekend of – well, I don’t really want to dwell on it if you don’t mind.

Michael Spence paid a flying visit to AAU, just to check in on what the little people were up to, and spotted the attractive form of Dr Lulu Hutchison. This triggered his “flirt” reflex, and pretty soon he had her practising suturing bananas. As you do. The phallic nature of this exercise was not lost on Sacha, who advised Mr 70′s Trousers that Lulu was Sir Fraser’s daughter, so he’d Best Not Go There.

Next time: Frieda’s back! Yay! And she’s bonding with Eddi over their shared dislike of Lulu! Double yay! And we aren’t done with the unravelling of Greg’s dark secrets – triple yay! And Funny Little Nurse Tait is… well, she just is.

Posted by PLA (more Holby City here)

Casualty: You’ve got to have faith

(Series 25, Ep.44) This Casualty and Holby concept of using the patients to illuminate the inner psyches of the regular cast (which loyal readers will by now know I call “Speak Your Brains“) is getting ridiculous. This week, top-of-the-range guest artistes Andrew Sachs and Anita Dobson were made to suffer as a bullied and beleaguered Jewish couple, basically to give Mads the oomph she needed to report her assault to the police. Rachel and Mendel Lan (Dobson and Sachs) were pharmacists who’d been bothered by a nasty, heroin-addicted thug for years, so Rachel took it upon herself to add a little something extra to the methadone he was forcing her to give him, but not before her husband had been seriously injured.

It didn’t end well – the old man had a stroke and Rachel was arrested, but not before pouring out her woes to Mads, and her regrets that the thug hadn’t been stopped earlier. Mads gave it that wide-eyed stare and nodded a bit, and then told Lenny (whom she’d earlier told about the attack) that she was now ready to talk to the police. Credit here to Ashley Artus, who played DI Berkeley. It’s not often that an actor with a bit-part as a policeman in Casualty manages to exhibit any personality, but DI Berkeley was quirky and realistically patronising (he talked very s-l-o-w-l-y to Rachel, who was both getting on a bit and had an accent).

The episode was called Pascal’s Wager, a term which I confess I had to look up. It apparently means that, in the absence of any proof either way as to the existence of God, it makes more sense to live life as if he/she/it does exist, because you’ll be happier. Something like that, anyway. I’m not quite sure how that related to the episode, apart from the Lans were Jewish and Mads is Muslim, but still…

In other news, Dr Dylan Keogh slept in his car so the homeless girl from last week could sleep in his houseboat, but when he found her collapsed, and found out she was only 15, he was in big trouble. Thanks to his ninja-level diagnostic skills he managed to get out of the fine mess he was in, and save her life, but not before a short period of being unemployed, when Nick Jordan told him to resign. He’s now been reinstated, again, which is good news because he fancies Dr Zoe Hanna, and it’s been too long since we’ve seen the old Dr Zoe Hanna magic in full force. After a spot of after-work flirtatious banter, she sauntered off. “Stop waggling!” said Dr Dylan. “Stop looking!” she threw back at him. But of course he won’t. Ah, those trademark Dr Zoe Hanna pencil skirts. Fabulous.

Next time: Oh, look out. Adam’s fabled “god complex” is back.

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Holby City: Malick’s got form, but Dan’s got the guilty conscience

(Series 13, Ep.39) We picked up where we left off last week, with Malick having just punched Dull Dan. And bravo to the makeup department for making Dan’s nose look particularly gory and horrible. Gushing blood like the proverbial stuck pig, Dan staggered down several corridors leaving a messy trail behind him. He wasn’t bothered about hygiene or the poor person who’d have to clean up after him. He was mainly bothered about what Chrissie would say when she saw him all busted up, and how he would explain it, without mentioning the “I kissed a boy and I liked it” bit. What Malick didn’t want was to be sacked from yet another job for punching yet another consultant.

Dan’s first attempt at an explanation went along the lines of, “I got in the middle of a fight between a father and a son.” Chrissie is no fool, and she knew that wasn’t true, otherwise it would have been the talk of the hospital coffee bar and Dan would be filling out incident report forms in triplicate. She also spotted that Dan was acting very weirdly around Malick – though he’s been doing that for about a month now without her noticing anything. “It was Malick, wasn’t it?” she said, and Dan fell to his knees sobbing, “It’s always been Malick! He has something you can’t give me, Chrissie!” Actually no, he didn’t say that. What he said was that he’d tried to hit Malick first, and missed.

For reasons best known to herself, Chrissie marched off to Hanssen with this information, and he in return produced possibly the finest loom of his entire career so far when he materialised in a corridor to summon Dan to a meeting in his office at four o’clock. Never have the words “four” and “o’clock” sounded so ominous. So four o’clock was Dan’s High Noon, and he took Malick along too, so they could both pretend they knew nothing and hadn’t done anything and were both somewhere else when Dan fell and hit his face on a… thing. Hanssen’s even less of a fool than Chrissie, but what can you do when people close rank?  

Casualty: Adam knows best

(Series 25, Ep.44) Last week, we were informed that Adam has a “god complex.” Frankly I’m not seeing it, myself. What I’m seeing is a doctor who’s trying to do the best for his patients and grappling with moral dilemmas. He doesn’t always choose the path through the moral dilemma that others would, but that’s the nature of moral dilemmas and it certainly doesn’t mean you’ve got a god complex.

Maverick Nurse Kirsty disagrees with me, because Adam is way more maverick than she is at the moment, and she’s not happy. This is the woman who used to enjoy testing rules to breaking point. Anyway, the moral maze in which Adam found himself this week concerned a man who was dying of mesothelioma, which he’d got by being in contact with asbestos from his father’s factory. He was about to testify in a law suit against the company, currently owned by his brother, Gary Kemp out of Spandau Ballet. Gary really needed the brother out of the way so he didn’t testify, and tried to persuade Adam that his patient didn’t want to be resuscitated. Adam saw through the handiness of this scheme, however, so Gary resorted to a spot of cyanide poisoning. This unlikely eventuality was spotted by Dr Dylan Keogh, and Gary ended up in the police station, and the brother lived just long enough to do his testimony via video link. Maverick Nurse Kirsty was cross that Adam chose to tell the brother that Gary had tried to kill him. “It wasn’t your call, Adam,” she told him. Technically, maybe not – but Adam’s actions seemed fairly sound to me.  

Holby City: I simply can’t let you go

(Series 13, Ep.38) Ooh, these buttoned-up, ice cool, intellectual types. Under a beautifully-ironed shirt, a suit and a sensible tie there’s all sorts of passion absolutely seething away, and there’s no moment more sexually charged than the one in which a bit of seethe is allowed to escape.

So we have Henrik Hanssen: Swedish, solid, sensible – like IKEA furniture but more scary. A man who would not be moved, apart from the fact that he is deeply in love with Sahira Shah the Registrah. She’s his physical and emotional opposite, the sun to his moon, the yang to his yin etc etc.

Miss Shah does not want the CT service on Darwin to go down the pan. We’re all with her on that one, and so are Jac, Elliott and Irish Dr Greg. Sahira, however, is the only one that Hanssen listens to.  ”What has she got that we haven’t?” muses Jac, as the three of them eavesdrop on Hanssen and Shah slugging it out in his office. “Breasts?” hazards Greg, quickly adding, “Not that yours aren’t spectacular.” I loved the way Jac quickly readjusted her top just in case she was showing any unprofessional cleavage. She wasn’t.  

Casualty: What’s in the green bag, Adam?

(Series 25, Ep.42) Big Mac wasn’t a happy man when he was asked to add “deep cleaning of trolleys” to his already burdensome list of duties – doing the crossword, some impromptu gambling, joshing with Noel and a little light portering. It didn’t take long before you could see his point, though – resus was literally awash with gore, after a man threw up more blood than a man has a right to do and most of it ended up on the floor. You wouldn’t want to be the person deep cleaning that particular trolley.

The deep cleaning thing was part of yet another initiative designed by Henry to make life for casualty staff so much more difficult. Poor Lush Linda was struggling to cope with the added admin and mutinous staff, but she found an ally in Nick Jordan’s new PA, Emily (catchphrase: “I’m helpin’!”). Emily left at the end of the episode intent on becoming a nurse, and I hope that when she finishes her training – which will probably take three weeks in Holby time – she’ll be back at Holby (either upstairs in Holby City or downstairs in Casualty), because she was lovely.

Meanwhile, the programme information told us that “Adam’s God complex continues.” Continues? When did it start? Have I missed something? Anyway, this God complex was signalled in NICE BIG LETTERS by a recurring motif of Adam’s big, godlike eye peering through a glass at a little fly, over which he had the power of life or death. Subtle, huh? The patient over which he wielded this power was a paedophile, beaten up within an inch of his life by the father of one of his victims (this father was the man who was heaving up blood all over the floor in resus – so often we get two for the price of one with Casualty patients).

The paedophile’s mother was played by the radiantly gorgeous Denise Welch, but frankly that’s all he had going for him (and she didn’t like him either). He told Adam he couldn’t cope with the horrible impulses that made him behave the way he did, and said he wanted a way out. The power was in Adam’s hands – an ethical dilemma indeed.

Lennie wanted to be Adam’s wing man (“I’m your boss, not your friend,” said the ever-chirpy Adam), but he was a little concerned when Adam visited the pharmacy and obtained a small green bag of something or other. Was Adam planning to despatch the sex offender to the hereafter with a hypodermic? Well, no, he wasn’t. His God complex doesn’t go quite that far. Instead he provided the man with something hormonal to (hopefully) curb his urges, and released him back into the wilds of Holby. Let’s just hope we don’t hear of him again.

And, in case we missed the fly metaphor the first time, and the second, the episode closed with Adam’s big eye looking at the fly, and then Adam releasing it into the air. That’s just what Big Mac doesn’t need – a department crawling with flies while he’s trying to deep clean.

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Holby City: Is it the end of Darwin as we know it?

(Series 13, Ep.37) Henrik Hanssen is only really comfortable when he’s top banana. That’s why he’s so tall, so he can gaze down on everybody with his unnervingly calm stare. Sir Fraser Anderson is a higher banana status-wise, but can’t compete with the Hanssen height. “Henrik! You get taller every time I see you!” he greeted the Swedish Scalpel. “What do you do – hang yourself up by your toes?”

The other thing that can flap the unflappable Scandinavian is Sahira Shah the registrah, and she hit him with the shock news that, if there was no future for CT at Holby she’d be upping sticks to Newcastle (where, presumably, they’re still old-fashioned enough to be having heart problems). So there was double pressure on Hanssen and he decided to go the traditional Holby route and do some high-risk, flashy surgery to prove to Sir Fraser that a multi-disciplinary Darwin was do-able.

He assembled a crack team of almost every surgeon in the hospital to help piece together a Polish man who’d been comprehensively mashed in an accident. Hanssen decided to go ahead with this despite a trace of amphetamine in the patient’s blood. Unfortunately, it turned out the patient’s mate had been slipping him speed on a regular basis, and his system was so entirely perky that he woke up half way through the operation. That’s not what you want when you’ve got Elliott Hope and Henrik Hanssen poking about in your innermost self, and Plastic Bhatti and Michael Spence hovering impatiently waiting to fix up your externals.  

Casualty: I’m so proud of you, Mr Collier/Dr Winters/Nurse Andrews

(Series 25, Ep.41) The broad theme of this episode was acceptance of your own strengths and weaknesses. Paramedic Jeff, Lush Linda and Dr Ruth Winters all learned valuable life lessons over the course of fifty minutes.

Jeff first, and he was still fretting about Karl, the cousin of the College Shooter. Remember last week, when Karl’s new girlfriend came a cropper on a railway line, and Karl went off in an angsty strop? Jeff was convinced that Karl was off to Do Something Stupid. “It’s not your responsibility,” Dixie told her troubled colleague. He ignored this advice because he was getting his instructions from Polly. She may be dead, but her handy book of quotations was still around to lend a spot of guidance when needed, and it was currently falling open at a page that said: “When the call comes, the great man always answers or chooses to live with a lifetime of regret.” Deep, huh? Not wanting to live with a lifetime of regret, Jeff decided to track Karl down, and, as expected, he was roaming the corridors of Holby College with his hood up and a rucksack over his shoulder, looking for all the world like he was trying to find a good vantage point to do a spot of shooting.

Only he wasn’t. He was replacing mobile phones he nicked earlier, because he’s turned over a new leaf and he’s a good boy now, such is the power of Polly, even posthumously. Heck, he even diagnosed a girl who was having a TIA. We’ll make a paramedic of him yet! There were a couple of niggles to iron out, such as him trying to dangle the girl’s boyfriend over a balcony  in A&E, and the fact that he’d known that his cousin had a gun but hadn’t told anyone, but that was all easily sorted out. And Jeffrey was left with a good feeling. He’d helped Karl out, and no longer felt the need to be Polly’s emissary on Planet Earth. The book of quotations went into the bin. “I’m so proud of you, Mr Collier,” said Dixie.