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Sunday, August 2, 2009

"Where is Charlie Fairhead?" - a Casualty Series 23 appraisal

4:23 PM / Television / 3 Comments

Another year, another 48 episodes, another "Why am I still watching this?" conundrum. The answer to the latter point, I suppose, is that I'm a glutton for punishment. I'm also, however, an optimist, and I continue to cling to the vague hope that, eventually, things will get better and we'll experience a return to the sort of drama I grew up with in the late '80s and '90s. And, to be fair, present day Casualty, for all its problems, is not wholly without merit. Every now and then, the cast and crew do manage to pull the rug out from under my feet and deliver something unexpectedly good. The very fact that a decent episode is so unexpected, however, is a clear indication that the powers that be are getting more wrong than right. The proof in the pudding is the fact that, in a season of 48 episodes, I can count on one hand the ones that I wouldn't relegate to the scrap heap.

What I will say in this season's favour is that, when it ended last night, it did feel as if an actual story had been told - one that, unlike the last couple of series, had a beginning, middle and end. I attribute a lot of this to the more stable cast when compared to last year. While a handful of characters did leave over the course of the series (and another two last night in the season finale), the fact that there weren't arrivals and departures left, right and centre, as was the case with Series 22, meant that the writers were able to work with what they had rather than being forced to scramble to pull together an intro or exit storyline every other episode. In the grand scheme of things, this is significant as it leads to an overall sense of completion rather than feeling that you've simply watched 48 unconnected episodes. Furthermore, re-watching the opening two-parter recently, I was struck by how deliberately it set up or foreshadowed most of the key developments for the rest of the season. Someone clearly took the time to plan these storylines, which is already an improvement on the previous series.

The writing staff was more stable too. While there was still the inevitable influx of student writers each contributing their solitary script and then disappearing again, more of an effort seems to have been made to nurture an established core team, headed up by Mark Catley, who wrote all of the best episodes in the previous series and, by and large, does so again here. Writers like Catley are serious assets to shows like Casualty, which tend largely to draw from a pool of soap opera writers who seem generally to have little interest in telling stories that have anything to do with medicine. Catley is a product of that same school, but unlike many of his contemporaries has a clear voice of his own and an excellent grasp on character. (On the other hand, the presence of a particular writer is no guarantee of an episode's quality: it's worth pointing out that the same writer, Dana Fainaru, was responsible for one of my favourite and one of my least favourite episodes of the season.)

Casualty, cast of 2008-2009 (poorly collaged).

So, more stable cast, more stable pool of writers. More stable quality? Well, sort of. Series 23 tended not to lurch between extremes of good and bad, instead occupying more of a middle ground of mediocrity, with a few gems and a few absolute stinkers sprinkled around at random. In the previous series, the highs were higher and the lows were lower. What this means is that, while we don't have to endure anything as bad this time round as Series 22's "Face the World", we also don't get to enjoy another "Charlie's Anniversary". I spoke about the effect of this mediocrity in a post I wrote a couple of months back, and my opinion of the season as a whole remains much the same as it did back in June:

Very little of it has been dreadful per se - if it were truly appalling, I could at least sink my teeth into tearing it to shreds - but most of it has simply been completely an utterly pedestrian and unremarkable.

Far more than individual poor or forgettable episodes, however, the series' greatest problem is its cumulative effect. The previous series benefited to some extent from the presence of former writer and Waking the Dead creator Barbara Machin in the role of Series Consultant. While it's unclear just how much of a say she had in creative matters, it seems clear to me that she succeeded in centring its storylines in and around the hospital, however tenuous the connection, and made some attempt to convince us there were bigger issues at stake than who was getting into whose trousers. Nowhere is her departure (Mark Catley took over the title of Series Consultant as of S23E01) felt more keenly than in the massive increase in the soap-oriented nature of the storylines. Series 23 reverses virtually all the progress made last year, to the extent that the hospital setting almost ceases to matter in the grand scheme of things. Alice (Sam Grey) and Curtis (Abdul Salis), for example, may be a health-care assistant and a paramedic respectively, but their relationship (if you can call it that - between them they generate all the heat of an iceberg) would unfold exactly the same if they were hairdressers, college students or whatever. It doesn't help that we almost never see Alice doing any actual work - to the extent that, when told to take a patient's obs in "My Last Day: Part 1", my initial reaction was one of surprise, followed by several moments of head-scratching and asking myself "Can she actually do that?" (The answer is yes, she can, as HCAs can do basic obs such as checking blood pressure, pulse and sats, but, despite having held the job for 18 months, we'd never seen her actually doing anything like this before.) In the medical content, she just seems to flit around, popping into frame when required to deliver some dialogue pertinent to her ongoing storyline, then disappearing again.

On the other hand, once we leave the department and the soap storylines take over wholesale, Alice becomes all too visible. After spending nearly three years on the programme as virtual set dressing, looking pretty but doing little else, she was suddenly pushed centre stage post-Christmas in what turned out to be one of Series 23's most prominent and most irritating storylines. Thanks to her boyfriend Curtis' less than savoury past, this demure and self-effacing individual finds herself being menaced by a drug baron from the local estate. Eventually, she's beaten up by said baron's lackeys, prompting... well, prompting the story to peter out completely as the baron is caught on camera admitting to murder and thrown in the clink. From then on, implausible gangsterisms give way to infuriating soap opera as the most sickly sweet (and unconvincing) couple on the planet lock lips at every opportunity and plan their glorious wedding, only for it all to go sour in the grand finale as our friendly neighbourhood drug pusher is released from prison and ends up on the sharp end of a rival gangster's knife. Cue the predictable outcome of Curtis the plank being falsely accused of his murder and a string of inanities as he and his bride to be go on the run from the law in a series of ridiculous set-pieces that Sam Grey herself described in some magazine or other as something out of an episode of Scooby-doo. (I detest Scooby-doo.) Meanwhile, I'm staring at the screen and scratching my head, thinking "Wait a minute - isn't this supposed to be a programme about an Accident & Emergency department?" Grey certainly acted the socks off her fellow cast members in the tumultuous two-parter that brought the series to a close, but the best performance in the world can't completely overcome shoddy material.

I've spent some time discussing the Alice situation because she's cute because it is, I think, representative of one of the current problems with show show as a whole. That is the writers' seeming lack of interest in the nurses who were once the show's lynchpin (for the sake of clarity, I'm including HCAs under this umbrella, although they are not actually qualified nurses). Presumably, their roles just aren't considered glamorous enough by the writers, which is why, in the hospital, they tend to fade into the background and the bulk of the nursing duties end up being fulfilled by non-speaking extras. The writers then compensate for this by involving them in wholly unbelievable external storylines which, rather than relying on them doing their jobs within the hospital environment, tap into a misguided and poorly executed attempt to focus on "current affairs" such as Britain's drug culture and the rise of the chav. Such problems clearly don't exist for the doctors, who get to be dashing and save lives, even going as far as to perform open heart surgery in Resus (in the case of Nick Jordan). In the early days of Casualty (actually, Series 1-15, if we're being honest), everyone was, in their own small way, a hero of sorts, but the heroes were down-to-earth and convincing, not granite-faced musclemen with too much hair gel. Also, while this may be a minority opinion, I tend to think that the issues faced by those on the lower rungs of the professional ladder are more interesting, given that they tend to be the ones with the most hands-on contact with the patients.

One nurse does get a developed storyline, but it turns out to be so nauseating that I find myself wishing the writers hadn't bothered. That character is Jessica (Gillian Kearney), who arrived half-way through the previous series and was immediately thrown into a yawn-inducing romantic triangle involving her husband, Sean (Richard Dillane), and consultant Adam (Tristan Gemmill), themselves both fairly new additions. This torrid little affair was skin-crawling enough in Series 22, but in Series 23 it balloons out of all proportions, dwarfing every single other ongoing storyline to the extent that, for a long while, the programme might as well have been renamed "The Adam and Jessica Show". Ooh, the big handsome doctor and the sweet little nurse - it's straight out of third-rate Mills & Boon, and Mills & Boon is, or so I'm told, already about as third-rate as you can get. To make matters worse, the writers even decide to toss in the oldest cliché in the book by having Jessica get pregnant. Sorry, but I don't watch medical dramas to play "Whose baby is it?" I watch them primarily for the patient storylines, the departmental politics, the inventive accidents and the gore (many of these programmes feature blood and guts the like of which would put the most gruesome "Video Nasties" to shame). If I cared even remotely about who knocked up who, I'd cut my losses and tune into EastEnders or Hollyoaks instead, where there wouldn't be any of those pesky medical incidents to get in the way.

If there's a bright spot in all of this nonsense, it's the storyline focusing on the character of clinical lead Nick Jordan (Michael French) and the diagnosis of an inoperable tumour on his brain. Nick was a character in the first two series of spin-off show Holby City, and I must admit that I treated the news of him joining the Casualty team at the start of Series 23 with a great deal of suspicion. Nick was always a bit of a sensationalist character - arrogant, lothario, a self-centred hothead who tended to be only too happy to throw his colleagues under a bus to further his own ends - and I suspected that he was being brought in purely to "spice things up", which was the last thing the show actually needed. This may have been the producers' original intention, but in reality Nick's storyline turned out to be a poignant affair, showing a man who always wanted to be in charge of his own destiny coming to terms with the gradual onset of the loss of his faculties and struggling to admit to himself and others that he was dying. In one of the stronger episodes of the season, "Not Over 'Til the Fat Lady Sings", he suffered a seizure that was unsettlingly believable and reduced the confident, authoritative doctor to a broken, drooling wreck of a man. When Nick quietly bowed out of the show in the season finale, via the back door and knowing very well that he was probably going to his death, I was genuinely sorry to see him go.

I've only covered a handful of the ongoing storylines for Series 23. With a regular cast of anywhere between fifteen and eighteen, depending who was leaving and who was arriving at any given time, there was understandably a lot going on, although certain storylines did have a tendency to dominate at the expense of others. I haven't mentioned new trainee paramedic Polly (Sophia Di Martino), whose cheery demeanour made for a breath of fresh air when compared to her dour and put-upon team mates, or the unexpected diamond in the rough that was the burgeoning relationship between consultant Zoe (Sunetra Sarker) and a young orphaned girl, which caused me to see a previously irritating and unlikeable character in a completely different light. Although I had numerous problems with the manner in which this storyline initially developed and the fact that it was never satisfactorily resolved, it proved to me that, despite its myriad problems, Casualty can still handle actual character development and manage to be quietly poignant when it tries. Over the course of this series, Zoe went from being a character I would have happily shoved into the path of an oncoming lorry to someone I genuinely enjoy watching.

At the other end of the spectrum, "character development" is a phrase unknown to the people responsible for plotting out Ruth (Georgia Taylor)'s character arc, or lack thereof. Ruth arrived at the beginning of Series 22 and quickly established herself as a cold fish, obnoxious to her colleagues, unable to relate to her patients and with a vastly over-inflated sense of her own skills. Since joining the team, Ruth has endangered the lives of numerous patients, alienated herself from her co-workers and survived a suicide attempt, which gave her an increased awareness of her own fallibility but failed to make her any more likeable as a human being. For the most part, Ruth spent Series 23 trapped in a rut, learning the same lessons over and over but continually failing to take them to heart. Seriously, it was like Groundhog Day. While the tentative (and refreshingly unsensationalist) romance that developed in the latter part of the series between her and one of the nurses, Jay (Ben Turner), did hint that cracks may be beginning to appear in her armour, I'm irritated by the fact that a character can go through so much but learn so little from it. Oh, and I'm still seething over the thoroughly shoddy mid-season exit given to her fellow junior doctor, Toby (Matthew Needham), which taught us that having sex with a member of the same sex immediately turns you gay (not bisexual or questioning, full-blown homosexual), and that such people can't possibly hope to cut it in the world of medicine. This was clearly a hastily-assembled storyline to accommodate the actor's unexpected exit, but you'd think the writers could have come up with something more convincing and less insulting. ("You slept with a man. That makes you gay - sorry." One character actually said this, without a hint of irony.)

That's about all I've got to say. I'll close with my ratings out of 10 for each of the 48 episodes, and my personal top and bottom five episodes of the series. I've marked particularly good (8/10 or higher) episodes in bold and particularly bad (3/10 or lower) ones in italics.

• 23.01: "Farmead Menace: Part 1" by Mark Catley - 9/10
• 23.02: "Farmead Menace: Part 2" by Mark Catley - 9/10 (best episode of Series 23)
• 23.03: "Interventions" by Paul Logue - 7/10
• 23.04: "Guilt Complex" by Paul Logue & Paul Campbell - 5/10
• 23.05: "Face Up" by Suzie Smith - 6/10
• 23.06: "Hurt" by Jeff Povey - 7/10
• 23.07: "There and Back Again" by Jason Sutton - 5/10
• 23.08: "The Evil That Men Do" by David Bowker - 5/10
• 23.09: "The Line of Fire" by Michael Levine - 6/10
• 23.10: "Impact" by Mark Cairns - 7/10
• 23.11: "Own Personal Jesus" by Dana Fainaru - 7/10
• 23.12: "Reality Bites" by Martin Jameson - 4/10
• 23.13: "A Slip in Time" by Sasha Hails - 3/10 (worst episode of Series 23)
• 23.14: "Happiness" by Daisy Coulam - 4/10
• 23.15: "Doing the Right Thing" by Abi Bown - 3/10
• 23.16: "This Will Be Our Year" (Part 1 of 2) by Paul Logue - 6/10
• 23.17: "Took a Long Time to Come" (Part 2 of 2) by Paul Logue - 7/10
• 23.18: "My Last Day: Part 1" by Mark Catley - 6/10
• 23.19: "My Last Day: Part 2" by Mark Catley - 8/10
• 23.20: "Crush" by Jeff Povey - 5/10
• 23.21: "No Going Back" by Abby Ajayi - 7/10
• 23.22: "Price of Life" by Daisy Coulam - 4/10
• 23.23: "Midday Sun" by Karen Laws - 5/10
• 23.24: "Watershed" by Dana Fainaru - 8/10
• 23.25: "Stand By Me" by Suzie Smith - 5/10
• 23.26: "Blood" by Justin Young - 4/10
• 23.27: "Could We Be Heroes?" by Jeff Povey - 5/10
• 23.28: "Before a Fall" by Martin Jameson - 7/10
• 23.29: "Shields" by Philip Gawthorne & Daisy Coulam - 7/10
• 23.30: "Lie Low" by Dana Fainaru - 3/10
• 23.31: "All You Need is Love" by Ellen Taylor & Mark Catley - 6/10
• 23.32: "True Lies" by Sally Tatchell - 7/10
• 23.33: "Someone to Watch Over Me" by Sasha Hails - 6/10
• 23.34: "The Trap" by Lena Rae & Mark Catley - 5/10
• 23.35: "Better Drowned" by Paul Logue - 5/10
• 23.36: "The Price We Pay" by Daisy Coulam - 4/10
• 23.37: "Hostile Takeover" by Mark Cairns - 7/10
• 23.38: "With This Ring" by Martin Jameson & Alice Nutter - 4/10
• 23.39: "Who Do You Think You Are?" by Jeff Povey - 8/10
• 23.40: "Palimpsest" by Jason Sutton - 7/10
• 23.41: "Fight or Flight by Fiona Evans - 7/10
• 23.42: "Parent Trap" by Suzie Smith - 4/10
• 23.43: "Not Over 'Til the Fat Lady Sings" by Sasha Hails - 7/10
• 23.44: "Ask Me No Questions" by Justin Young - 5/10
• 23.45: "Ashes" by Martin Jameson - 5/10
• 23.46: "Great Expectations" by Michael Levine - 6/10
• 23.47: "No Fjords in Finland: Part 1" by Paul Logue - 6/10
• 23.48: "No Fjords in Finland: Part 2" by Paul Logue - 7/10

Key writers: Paul Logue (6½ episodes), Mark Catley (4½+½ episodes), Jeff Povey (4 episodes), Daisy Coulam (3½ episodes), Martin Jameson (3½ episodes), Dana Fainaru (3 episodes), Sasha Hails (3 episodes), Suzie Smith (3 episodes)

Top 5 episodes (best first):

1. 23.02: "Farmead Menace: Part 2" by Mark Catley
2. 23.01: "Farmead Menace: Part 1" by Mark Catley
3. 23.39: "Who Do You Think You Are?" by Jeff Povey
4. 23.19: "My Last Day: Part 2" by Mark Catley
5. 23.24: "Watershed" by Dana Fainaru

Bottom 5 episodes (worst first):

1. 23.13: "A Slip in Time" by Sasha Hails
2. 23.15: "Doing the Right Thing" by Abi Bown
3. 23.30: "Lie Low" by Dana Fainaru
4. 23.14: "Happiness" by Daisy Coulam
5. 23.12: "Reality Bites" by Martin Jameson

(Incidentally, the title for this post comes from a line spoken in Episode 45, which I found quite appropriate given the show's longest-serving character's absence from nearly half of the series' episodes, and his complete lack of anything approaching an actual storyline.)

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