Hospital Radio Times

It's time for one of the blog's old standbys: sticking a search term into the BBC Genome and seeing what comes up. After several searches failed to produce anything that was sufficiently interesting to write a blog about, I ended up searching for Saturday-night stalwart Casualty.

As we've covered before, producers used to be able to write their own little synopses to be used in the Radio Times listings, and this was the case for the very first series of Casualty, as screened in 1986. The very first episode uses a rather generic description (although it describes "eight heroes" when there were ten regular cast members - I presume they're leaving the paramedics out, which is rather controversial), but most of the rest of the series' listings simply use a quote from the episode, which is a rather effective touch. Occasionally they're a bit unknowable, but they do sell the show quite well, and this is just another example of how nice it was that the people behind the programme could creatively and succinctly sell their show in this way.

This method continued into the second series, where amusingly the one for episode 3 forgets to put the line in quotation marks (it's unclear whether this is the fault of the original listing or the Genome), which makes it look a bit like the Radio Times editor is having a breakdown. It's also still in use by the third, (the one for "Absolution" is particularly effective) although in all three series there's the occasional one where they go for a more general description, more like one you'd find today; I presume this was simply because whoever was submitting these (was it Jeremy Brock and Paul Unwin themselves, I wonder?) didn't have the time to pull out a quote. This is notably used for "Burn Out", the episode where Ewart Plimmer is killed off; it might have been interesting if they'd chosen something that foreshadowed that moment there. The quotes continue to be occasionally unknowable, with episode 6 simply being surmised as "I've got to send a flying squad out..." (When the episode was repeated a few months later, this was revised to "I've got to send a flying squad out to a serious road traffic accident. Cyril, that means you..." Was the original version deemed too obscure?)

Incidentally, a combination of the Genome and Wikipedia brings up a fascinating fact about the scheduling of the third series. I was already aware that episode 7, "A Wing and a Prayer", was pulled from the schedules following the death of guest star Roy Kinnear; the remaining three episodes were all bumped up one week, and the pulled episode was aired several months later. What I hadn't realised was that the whole of Series 3 received a summer repeat run, and the missing episode was aired in its appropriate place as part of that run. I wonder if that confused many people.

There's an exciting development in Series 4: the single line has now changed to several lines of dialogue, basically a tiny little script extract. Given the changed line mentioned above, maybe this was to sell things better? It's also interesting to go through these and be reminded of who got their start on this show: Lark Rise to Candleford's Bill Gallagher and Skins' Bryan Elsley, for instance.

Bizarrely enough, when Series 4 was repeated a few months after it first went out, the dialogue had been replaced with straightforward synopses. This was a sad portent of things to come, as when Series 5 began in the Autumn, that was the case too. The practice of letting the show's producers be creative with the RT listing wouldn't end for several years yet, so this is presumably down to Brock and Unwin now having departed the show. The show's new script editor was Andrew Cartmel, who had previously filled that role on the Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who, and several of the scriptwriters on Series 5 should prove familiar to Who fans: the likes of Ben Aaronovitch, Ian Briggs, Rona Munro and Stephen Wyatt all followed Cartmel over from the temporarily defunct sci-fi show (as well as Robin Mukherjee, who would've probably written a script for the 1990 run of Who were it not for the BBC pulling the plug). It still seems slightly odd that the quotes ended at this point, though; not only were they a really good way of selling the show, Doctor Who also had a long history of using its opportunity to write creative RT listings (something the blog will cover in due course, no doubt), so it seems unlikely Cartmel's arrival was the result of that. Maybe the change of producer? Maybe they were just taking a bit too much time to write? (I suspect the answer to this mystery is pretty mundane, to be honest.)

Still, there's a brief discourse on a mildly interesting, otherwise forgotten piece of a 31-year-old TV show's history. You're welcome to it.