For those in whose lives they have been a fixture, the departure of a familiar character from a long-running television series can seem almost like a bereavement. So it is with Charlie Fairhead, who left the BBC One hospital drama Casualty on Saturday at the climax of a classic two-parter. Over 38 years as a nurse at the accident and emergency department of Holby city hospital, Charlie had survived a shooting, an embolism and a couple of heart attacks. Such misadventures had merely enabled Derek Thompson, the actor who has played him for nearly 900 episodes, to take restorative breaks. But Charlie’s stabbing by a patient meant farewell – and a decision to retire.
Barring the death or serious indisposition of the actors involved, one can never be absolutely sure a character is gone. Just consider the succession who have made miraculous recoveries over the decades in EastEnders or Coronation Street. Thompson is about to start a new life as a retired police officer with a dodgy past in Blue Lights, set in his native city Belfast. But it looks as if this really is the end for Charlie, whose departure, on top of a reduction in the number of episodes a year, seems as ominous for the future of Casualty as the ravens abandoning the Tower of London.
The BBC insists that it will continue. But at a time when two other long-running medical series – Holby City and Doctors – have been axed, a certain anxiety among fans is understandable. Gone are the days when Casualty competed with Jack Rosenthal’s firefighting drama London’s Burning (1988-2002) or the American show ER (1994-2009) in the race for chart-topping storylines about the emergency services in action, though police dramas persist.
Charlie was both foundational to and emblematic of what Casualty was trying to achieve, in an earlier era of Conservative government when public services seemed to be under existential threat. He was not a glamorous doctor, like George Clooney’s Doug Ross in ER, but was based on an NHS nurse, Peter Salt, who has outlasted his fictional alter ego as the show’s medical adviser.
Mr Salt was working at Bristol Royal Infirmary when the show’s two young creators invited themselves in to research it. Paul Unwin and Jeremy Brock were in their early 20s, with an expertise that rested solely on having spent long spells themselves in hospital. Their manifesto, which sounds all too familiar today, opened: “In 1948, a dream was born. In 1985, that dream is in tatters.” Hospital staff, they believed, were a family under growing pressure from the collapse of the Bevanite ideal of free care at the point of need.
Charlie remained at the head of that family, a steadying presence with an instantly recognisable repertoire of mannerisms, as doctors came and went. Thompson, meanwhile, became one of the best paid actors working for the BBC. To be the star of a long-running TV or radio series is to exist in a very particular kind of gilded cage in which the cage can devour the bird. Just look at William Roache, recognised by the Guinness World Records as the longest-serving soap actor, having played Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow since 1960. While we mourn the loss of the West Country nurse Charlie Fairhead, we should also celebrate the liberation of the northern Irish actor Derek Thompson.
