Review

All too real

CASUALTY
BBC 1 TV

.You can’t deny the drama of Casualty. With the adrenaline-filled title music, flashing ambulance lights and ECG trace flickering across the screen, Casualty starts with a bang or is it a crash? The brow starts to sweat, the knuckles whiten, the pulse accelerates in the knowledge that, ere this theme is heard once more, you will have squirmed to the sound of bone crunching on bone.

Casualty is not for the faint hearted. This is a view of the emergency entrance of the NHS, its walls the colour of blood and vomit. More accurate even than ‘true-life documentaries’, Casualty gives a wealth of technical detail that would do credit to a trauma surgeons training video.

Despite its accuracy, you couldn’t say that this picture of Accident and Emergency life resembles reality. A genuine story of Casualty folk would consist of great oceans of tedium with occasional storms of hyperactivity. But you can appreciate the producer’s problem. Where is the drama in dressing a finger or diagnosing constipation?

The result is a month’s worth of tragedy boiled down into an hour. Perhaps this accounts for the exhaustion you feel as the final credits roll: watching Casualty is a more harrowing experience than working in a real Emergency Department.

But why gripe? Since when have hospital dramas worried about accuracy? Soaps set in hospitals have a peculiar grip on the imagination whatever the content. From Emergency Ward 10 to St. Elsewhere, we all share the urge to peep behind the screens at people sicker than ourselves, or to fantasise about the emotions which surge beneath those starched hospital uniforms. At least Casualty lets the (patronisingly termed) ancillary staff get a look in - and especially the ambulance crews, whose real life role in facing mayhem and saving lives is played to great advantage. Porters, receptionists all have their place. But the limelight is reserved for the nurses.

Whilst all the characters in Casualty are sharply drawn, none equal the nurses when it comes to the portrayal of real, contradictory, turbulent people. If a night in Casualty is rather like the admissions ward of Beirut Royal Infirmary, then the lives of its staff would make Florence Nightingale feel she’d been skiving in the Crimea.

Despite its modern building and ever present ambulance crews, Casualty has been a catalogue of the sinking fortunes of the hospital service. With emphasis of the crises of bed shortages, the dilemmas of where to put the old and sick, the battles over budget priorities, the series has not been short of controversy. Like a prolapsed pile Casualty has been a pain in the arse to successive junior health ministers. So why has this viewer stopped viewing? Well, it was the episode where the boy fell on the bonfire that did it - or was it the one when the man got boiling bitumen down his chest? The problem is it’s so depressing - a constant morbid sense of foreboding dominates each episode.

A person can only take so many badly maimed kiddies on a Friday night. You don’t have to watch too many episodes before you feel you’ve worked that corridor yourself, on all the worst days. Maybe Casualty is too accurate for its own good.