Individual Entry

Her brief return for these Christmas 2006 episodes was fairly well publicised by the BBC, and with good reason. More perhaps than any other Casualty writer, Machin is a writer who understands character. While many of her contemporaries during the golden age were writing politically angry, charged scripts which banged the tin drum mercilessly (in the best possible way, of course), her episodes tended to be less about tackling broad social concerns and more about examining how people react when placed in impossible situations. Killing Me Softly, the first episode of the two-parter, takes this to its apex by abandoning the show’s traditional “God’s eye” perspective in favour of focusing exclusively on the points of view of three individual characters: paramedic Josh, nurse Ellen and guest character Laura. Twenty minutes are devoted to each character, and each segment shows the events of the same timeframe through that character’s eyes, Rashomon-style. It’s an incredibly bold step for Casualty, which has, since its inception, been fairly conservative in terms of its formula.

That said, if all that had been achieved was to break the formula, then it would merely have been interesting, not necessarily good. What tips it over the edge from being an intriguing experiment to a great hour of drama is the great deal of care Machin takes with portraying each of the three characters. Even the character of Laura, who had only appeared briefly in one episode prior to this one, comes to life as a fully three-dimensional individual, thanks partly to the gung-ho performance by Holly Aird (who played Frankie in Waking the Dead and for whom Machin specifically wrote this Casualty role). Instead of just re-running the same events multiple times - a mistake that I feel was made with the otherwise excellent two-parter at the beginning of Series 22, My First Day/Charlie’s Anniversary - the script allows additional details to gradually seep in, crafting a bigger picture of the events that are occurring and providing an insight into the relevant character’s motivation with each rewind back to the beginning.

This is particularly true in terms of Laura, revealed to be suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, who in the first two segments is portrayed, through the eyes of Josh and Ellen, as an unreasonable and increasingly aggressive head-case. When the events are shown through Laura’s eyes, however, she becomes a concerned mother whose constant demands that her daughter’s supposed illness be taken seriously are continually met with scepticism and even hostility by the staff. In Laura’s version of events, many of the scenes which cross over with the previous two segments are re-shot, with the actors altering their performances to emphasise the differences in how she interprets their tone towards her. It’s a subtle but effective touch and, again, something that was absent from the Series 22 two-parter. It probably helps that all three of the actors - Ian Bleasdale, Georgina Bouzova and Holly Aird - give excellent performances that are among the best I can recall seeing in Casualty in recent years. Special mention must go to Bouzova, who gives what is undoubtedly her finest performance of her tenure on the show and one that jetisons all memory of her character’s early days as a conniving gold-digger with a wholly unconvincing Eastern European accent. Bleasdale’s performance is, I think, perhaps the better of the two, but as the show’s second-longest-serving actor, he had had plenty of opportunity to make his mark as a solid actor in the past. (The benchmark performance as far as Casualty is concerned, by the way, remains Claire Goose’s portrayal of Tina in Series 12’s Love Me Tender.)

There’s so much going on, a lot of it in the background, that several viewings are required in order to fully appreciate the complexity of both Machin’s script and Diarmuid Lawrence’s direction. For instance, in my most recent viewing I tried to block out the foreground action entirely and concentrate solely on what was going on in the background. In doing so, I picked up little nuances which hinted both at the way the main storyline was developing, as well as what those that were not directly involved were up to (the little “antler battle” going on between Guppy, Sam and Alice in the admin area is a particularly amusing touch). I suspect that even more could have been spun out of the events of this episode by examining the perspectives of yet more characters had there been more time.

The second part, Silent Night, is a lot closer to the standard Casualty formula, a couple of time-lapses and “rewinds” excepted, but interestingly enough, despite the return to the traditional “God’s eye” viewpoint, it is arguably even more revealing in terms of character than the first part. This time, the main focus is on the fight to save the life of Josh, stabbed by a hysterical Laura and left for dead in the back of an ambulance at the end of the previous episode, and it is here that the familial feeling and sense of teamwork that had been so absent from Casualty for a long time come back with a vengeance. Casualty in its earlier years was about a small group of flawed individuals fighting against the odds to make their A&E department work. As a result of the small cast and the strength they drew from one another, a definite sense developed of them being more than just friends and colleagues but an extended family of sorts. For various reasons, this feeling became less pronounced in recent years, with the ever-increasing number of episodes per series and the need, as a result, to expand the cast being the primary motivating factor, as well as a move towards sensationalism and tiresome arguments between the regulars, generally typified by torrid love triangles and unrealistic “villain” characters. On some level, you can argue that the sight of a regular character lying on a trolley in Resus with his entire chest cut open, fighting for his life, is nothing if not sensational, but what separates this from the sensationalism that was otherwise present in Series 21 is that it comes, first and foremost, from a medical perspective. Ultimately, it succeeds in getting back to the heart of the programme, pushing the medical element to the forefront while at the same time making it deeply personal to the regulars. What’s impressive about the Resus scenes is that they manage to be gripping both from the perspective of situation’s A-to-B mechanics (what do you do when the patient has lost so much blood that saline is pouring out of his stab wound and the hospital’s only rapid infuser is already being used in surgery?) and how this affects the team (Charlie’s anguish and growing frustration is palpable, and the look of abject horror on Alice’s face when she blunders into the room to deliver a message, coming face to face with what can only be described as a gore scene straight out of a splatter movie, is one of the most chilling moments in a long time). You don’t have to give two hoots about the characters to be engaged, but if you do, it adds a whole extra level of tension.

I should probably also mention the music, another stylistic touch that separates these episodes from their brethren. Barring some clumsy synthesiser work in the first couple of seasons, Casualty has never used music of any kind. These episodes, however, not only feature an ominous and actually rather effective backing score by Mark Hinton Stewart, which adds a great deal to the mood and ramps up the tension significantly (the scene in which Josh is discovered in the ambulance and rushed into Resus wouldn’t be half as effective without it), but also make great use of the hymn Miserere by Gregorio Allegri. This composition, which plays over the first scene of each episode and is also repeated at various other points (during the “rewinds” in the first part and over the montage at the end of the second part), is really not my kind of music, but I can’t imagine a better piece having been chosen. This, coupled with some impressive camerawork (the whole thing was shot with a Steadicam), lifts the overall standard of the show up a level while still broadly operating within the confines of the stylistic and budgetary limitations of a show like Casualty.

Why does it always snow on TV at Christmas?

Are these episodes beyond criticism? Well, sure, if you feel like it, you can pick holes. On a fairly minor level, you’ll sometimes notice that snatches of dialogue don’t quite match when they are repeated in a subsequent POV - for example, in the second part, Nathan’s dialogue on the phone, from Charlie’s POV, is “Broken down ambulance, main entrance…”, whereas, from Nathan’s POV, it’s “Broken down ambulance, outside the ED…” Like I said, this sort of thing doesn’t make any difference in the grand scheme of things, but it’s one of those little quality control issues that obsessives like myself are bound to fixate on. On a more moderate level, although an excellent job has, for the most part, been done of making it look as if the episodes are taking place in late December (they were actually shot in September), on a few occasions the budgetary limitations do give themselves away. This is particularly true at the start of Killing Me Softly, during the scene at the frozen lake, where, in the wider shots, it’s blatantly obvious that there is only snow on the ground and trees in the immediate vicinity. More significantly, you do have to contend with the fact that, in my opinion, a number of the regular characters at this point are neither all that well defined nor particularly likeable, nor are the ongoing serial storylines of a particularly high calibre; in that regard, it’s actually quite amazing what Machin manages to do with them. Finally, veteran viewers are likely to feel a sense of déjà vu at some of the events in the episode - regular character stabbed by mentally ill guest character, desperate battle to save them in Resus, arrogant surgeon swans in to save the day - which seem like a repeat of a previous Barbara Machin two-parter, the Series 11 finale Monday Bloody Monday and Perfect Blue. That said, the latter is my favourite episode of all time and the similarities don’t bother me. I feel that the inventive storytelling structure and overall tone of these episodes are sufficient to justify what might superficially seem like a retread.

This has been a long review, but I feel that some episodes are worthy of this sort of treatment. It’s hard to say how much an “outsider” would get out of these episodes, but as a regular Casualty viewer since around 1993, this two-parter both left me gobsmacked and reminded me of what the show had been capable of when it was at its zenith. When it first aired (on the 23rd and 24th of December), I spent all of Christmas Eve on tenterhooks, desperate to know what would happen next - something I hadn’t experienced with the show for nearly a decade. At the time, I hoped against hope that what Barbara Machin had done with these episodes would give the regular writers the kick up the backside they so sorely needed and encourage them to once again be daring and inventive. Sadly, it wasn’t to be, with this two-parter a veritable diamond in the rough - a gem twinkling amid a sea of (to quote Charlie Fairhead) the proverbial. Even so, that a series in its twenty-first year on the air could come up with episodes of this calibre is a laudable achievement, and one that, in some strange way, justifies all the disappointment and frustration I’ve had to endure in recent years as the show has otherwise gone from low to low. 10/10