Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 09:46:19 PM

Login with username, password and session length

BBC Casualty in the 1980s

Started by Virgo76, July 05, 2021, 07:56:27 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Virgo76

I have memories of this being very traumatic to watch in a way which it isn't today.
There was always a slow build-up to the inevitable horrific accident. Often the accident would be quite hard to predict. The woman getting a Badminton (or Squash?) racquet through her neck springs to mind.
There was an episode with a full blown plane crash as well. I remember a later Armando Iannucci parody where this was recreated in the form of a high speed 1920s silent film.
The show has changed a lot, I imagine?
Was it more political early on?
I remember it being more like Cardiac Arrest or Bodies were later. I remember lots of the doctors smoking and having liaisons on it.

Natnar

It did seem to be a bit more gritty in the 80's and didn't quite have the level of soapyness that it has today. Plus it was more like a regular series in the 80's with only 15 or so episodes a year. Every year they had to have some sort of big accident or disaster to end the series on, Massive pile up, train crashes, huge fires, mad knife men running around stabbing people etc.

Icehaven

Quote from: Virgo76 on July 05, 2021, 07:56:27 AM

There was always a slow build-up to the inevitable horrific accident. Often the accident would be quite hard to predict. The woman getting a Badminton (or Squash?) racquet through her neck springs to mind.


I must have watched Casualty loads of times throughout the 80s and 90s but this is literally the only bit I remember. Might be because we played Squash at school at the time so I was always very aware that it could happen to me.


Gulftastic

I remember one where someone was pushing a wheelbarrow of hot tar on the first story of some scaffolding. It didn't end well.

phantom_power

Yeah the squash one stuck with me as well, along with someone getting impaled on some railings outside a house

The Culture Bunker

Most of the entertainment was guessing who the fatality would be from the opening scenes of that week's soon-to-be visitors to A&E.

"Jeff with his power tools fucking about doing DIY seems a bit too obvious. I'm going with that Sharon who's popping down to the shop for a pint of milk. Probably hit by a bus driven by that Bob, who's been kept up all night by his newborn son, and ends up with a faceful of glass for his trouble."

AsparagusTrevor

I like to think the Final Destination films took inspiration from Casualty, there were always plenty of elaborate red herrings leading up to the accidents.

One episode which always stuck with me is one I saw when I was about 10, it involved a couple on a barge having a post-coitus cig which ended up igniting a huge fireball, obliterating the barge. I remember the nightmarish vision of the burned man carrying the even-more-burned woman. Or vise versa. It was pretty nasty whatever.

Icehaven

Quote from: Gulftastic on July 05, 2021, 10:50:01 AM
I remember one where someone was pushing a wheelbarrow of hot tar on the first story of some scaffolding. It didn't end well.

Actually yes that rings a bell! I think I remember thinking it would just burn a hole straight through him.

AsparagusTrevor

Quote from: AsparagusTrevor on July 05, 2021, 11:08:08 AM
I like to think the Final Destination films took inspiration from Casualty, there were always plenty of elaborate red herrings leading up to the accidents.

One episode which always stuck with me is one I saw when I was about 10, it involved a couple on a barge having a post-coitus cig which ended up igniting a huge fireball, obliterating the barge. I remember the nightmarish vision of the burned man carrying the even-more-burned woman. Or vise versa. It was pretty nasty whatever.

I managed to find the episode on Youtube. I think my young brain made it out to be worse than it actually is.

MojoJojo

I thought the squash one was a bloke -it was young guy and a middle aged man. The middle aged man spent a lot of time complaining about heart burn and a sore arm, so you thought he was going to have a heart attack, before stabbing himself in the throat.

From talking to other people, it is one of the most remembered episodes.


Icehaven

Quote from: MojoJojo on July 05, 2021, 11:17:29 AM
I thought the squash one was a bloke -it was young guy and a middle aged man. The middle aged man spent a lot of time complaining about heart burn and a sore arm, so you thought he was going to have a heart attack, before stabbing himself in the throat.

From talking to other people, it is one of the most remembered episodes.

No it's definitely a woman, here's the clip;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqV2g4MMqu4


Attila

I was introduced to Casualty in the late 1990s by an auntie who assured me it was a comedy (she certainly treated it as such, and absolutely loved/loves it and Holby). So that has always been my approach, even though I had nightmares after the very first episode I saw.

It used to be wonderfully gruesome in its heyday, and I would love a source of episodes from the mid 1990s through to about 2010 or so -- I had loads that Mr Attila would faithfully DVR for me between 2006 and 2012, but they have all sadly degraded (the wonderful years of Simon Macorkingdale as Harry Harper, Guppy -- who went to London for cigs and never came back -- and Stitch plus so many others. )

It is awfully soapy now, and the storylines are dragging on and on these days...really miss the red herring cold opens, trying to guess what was going to happen/who was going to end up in the meat grinder, &c.

Highlights I remember:

*very first episode I saw, lad wakes up tied to a tree, dressed as a bunny, after his stag do. He's at the bottom of a hill, so of course a farmer's runaway truck carooms down this hill and smashes him -- he lifted up his legs at the last minute, so the truck squashed his legs up against his body. What gave me nightmares wasn't the accident or whatever, it was a quicky thowaway scene in the emergency room while they were sorting him out.

*cold open that featured a couple arguing over breakfast, with the camera bopping back and forth between the arguing couple, baby child in its high chair, barky dog weaving in and out of the people and chair, lots of things sizzling on the stove, then the younger son comes in and blasts dad with a shotgun.

*Harry Harper up on the roof, trying to talk a young girl down who is having a moment, and has climbed a bit of scaffolding. He tries in his wooden way to tell her that life always has options, please come down, it'll be a brighter tomorrow. She cries at last that she believes him, and wants to start over, but she can't, she can't come down. Why not, says Harry, come on, no excuses. I can't! I really can't come down! she cries. No, no, says Harry, of course you can. No, no I can't, she says, pulling on hand away from the other: 'I've nailed my hand to the wall!'

So, so many more.

I have the first three series on DVD, because for a while they were releasing them. Way more political back in the day. Would absolutely love for the BBC to slap them all up on iPlayer.

Attila

Quote from: icehaven on July 05, 2021, 12:33:44 PM
No it's definitely a woman, here's the clip;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqV2g4MMqu4

I've never seen this episode, but mmm, that's the gruesome Casualty I started with.

It used to be I could never watch the recordings/show while eating, but now it's 'meh' in terms of the butcher's leftovers and syrup.

JesusAndYourBush

It used to be a lot more formulaic, so the episode would always start with the 'accident of the day', scenes set on a building site or someone at home with a wonky ladder or whatever, and you'd try and guess what the accident was going to be and they'd often trick you by making it something less obvious.  Nowadays it's become more like a soap with more character-driven stories.

In the early days, whenever they had to use the defibrillators to shock someone the person ALWAYS died.  This used to annoy me once I noticed the trend because I knew that (obviously) sometimes they worked but those early episodes displayed a 100% failure rate.

On its' sister show Holby City the operation scenes have got a lot more graphic within the last 3 years.

pigamus

My earliest memory of it is probably that student nurse who fucks everything up and gets on Duffy's nerves. Alex?

Hat FM

no one i've ever spoken to IRL remembered or was as mentally scarred as me by the squash racquet through the neck incident so i feel a little vindicated having seen a few people mention it here. That day i vowed never to play squash and i never have (as no one has ever asked me to).

Bad Ambassador

Quote from: Attila on July 05, 2021, 12:37:34 PM
*very first episode I saw, lad wakes up tied to a tree, dressed as a bunny, after his stag do. He's at the bottom of a hill, so of course a farmer's runaway truck carooms down this hill and smashes him -- he lifted up his legs at the last minute, so the truck squashed his legs up against his body. What gave me nightmares wasn't the accident or whatever, it was a quicky thowaway scene in the emergency room while they were sorting him out.

I'm imagining this as a huge human letter being folded in three and put into an enormous envelope, then posted to the crematorium.

Quote from: Hat FM on July 05, 2021, 03:07:39 PM
no one i've ever spoken to IRL remembered or was as mentally scarred as me by the squash racquet through the neck incident so i feel a little vindicated having seen a few people mention it here. That day i vowed never to play squash and i never have (as no one has ever asked me to).

From wiki:

"One Step Forward": A disagreement between two elderly men (Leslie Randall and Lionel Jeffries) results in a bicycle accident, a mentally handicapped girl cuts her hand after an argument with Ash, Julian has to save a squash player (Suzette Llewellyn) whose neck is impaled on her broken racquet and a father asks the staff to replace his daughter's front tooth so she can appear in a play.

Written by Peter (Blackpool, The A Word) Bowker!

phantom_power

Quote from: Hat FM on July 05, 2021, 03:07:39 PM
no one i've ever spoken to IRL remembered or was as mentally scarred as me by the squash racquet through the neck incident so i feel a little vindicated having seen a few people mention it here. That day i vowed never to play squash and i never have (as no one has ever asked me to).

I think the reason it stuck in my mind is because it is simultaneously horrifying but also utterly ridiculous

Icehaven

Was it Casualty where there was a young schizophrenic man (might have been played by Martino Lazerri) who ended up climbing up then falling off a giant crane? Or that might have been London's Burning.

Gulftastic

This was a moment we laughed about at work, when they tried to do a crush at a football match.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17VzMT_bNv4&t=20m48s

They seemed to have plenty of extras available, but decided that about a dozen would do. Instead of a panic, it looks like they are trying to crush the kids on purpose.

pigamus

Quote from: phantom_power on July 05, 2021, 03:32:10 PM
I think the reason it stuck in my mind is because it is simultaneously horrifying but also utterly ridiculous

Bet it's based on a real life thing - it's too weirdly specific

Attila

Quote from: JesusAndYourBush on July 05, 2021, 02:18:42 PM


In the early days, whenever they had to use the defibrillators to shock someone the person ALWAYS died.  This used to annoy me once I noticed the trend because I knew that (obviously) sometimes they worked but those early episodes displayed a 100% failure rate.

On its' sister show Holby City the operation scenes have got a lot more graphic within the last 3 years.

My fave is how you can have a horrific illness, but if you are a major part of the cast, you can brush off, say, a brain tumour with a good night's sleep.

Ex: Rick Griffith basically having cancer of evert vital organ, getting filleted on the operating table and pretty much restuffed with old newspapers, yet right as rain and back to marrying wife #16 within a couple of weeks (see also: him running over someone with his car on behalf of his daughter and nothing ever coming of it).
Ex: Nick Jordan's brain surgery, and back working as a neurosurgeon in a few weeks.

More recently, a really dramatic and thoughtful storyline about one of the docs needing a total mastectomy as a preventative measure, much soul-searching, tears, and finally being brave and going through this life-changing procedure. Two weeks later she's back running the hospital, enormous bust still visible (to be fair, with Holby cancelled, they probably don't care anymore).

Anyone suddenly waking up from any brain surgery as if they'd just been knocked out to have a tooth pulled gets on my wick, having nursed my mother back from an operation to save her from a subdural haemotoma about 10 years ago.

For years I only saw a handful of episodes twice a year, so I used to be baffled about Holby's heart survery ward being right next to, apparently, the baby department.

Nevertheless, I'll be sticking with them til Holby's switched off, and Charlie finally, finally decides to go back to making Christian pop singles with his sister.

Natnar

Two stories i remember from early Casuality, Two policemen somehow crashing into a lorry carrying some chemical and getting serious melty-skin chemical burns. Then one of the paramedics having his house & family blown up in explosion when during an undetected gas leak one of the family switches a lightswitch on.

greencalx

Is that the very first episode "Gas"? I watched that with my brother when it first aired.

We have the first series on DVD. It's very slow moving, basically one accident per episode and lots of Charlie and Duffy smoking in the staff room and talking to each other with cod Bristle accents.

Soapiness is not a new thing - been like that for the last 20 years at least. I really hate it when you see a patient for a second time as you know you'll be seeing them again and again, with increasing implausibility and tedium each time.

At the moment, it seems that acting bubbles basically restrict the patients to being staff members or their immediate families. We're having a lot of fun observing the careful two-metre distancing between performers.

Replies From View

Quote from: JesusAndYourBush on July 05, 2021, 02:18:42 PM
It used to be a lot more formulaic, so the episode would always start with the 'accident of the day', scenes set on a building site or someone at home with a wonky ladder or whatever, and you'd try and guess what the accident was going to be and they'd often trick you by making it something less obvious. 

Wasn't that 999?

paruses

Best 999 ever was the doddery old couple in the automatic car who, on leaving friends they had visited, instead of putting it in reverse put it in drive and floored the fucker thus driving through a conservatory and into a swimming pool. I think the jeopardy came because the fire brigade were laughing too hard to get them out.

Thanks to attilla for reverse-gaslighting me about boy with shotgun. For ages I thought I had made it up as it seemed so unlikely with all its quadruple bluffing. BLAM! Classic.

Quote from: The Culture Bunker on July 05, 2021, 11:03:20 AM
Most of the entertainment was guessing who the fatality would be from the opening scenes of that week's soon-to-be visitors to A&E.

"Jeff with his power tools fucking about doing DIY seems a bit too obvious. I'm going with that Sharon who's popping down to the shop for a pint of milk. Probably hit by a bus driven by that Bob, who's been kept up all night by his newborn son, and ends up with a faceful of glass for his trouble."

yes!  They were quite sneaky sometimes, sure I remember one where there were all sorts of potential accidents hinted at, before the guy returned safely home, and went to his garage where he'd hidden a packet of nuts.  He was only a suicidal nut allergy sufferer, wasn't he!!!  Why didn't we see that one coming!!!

paruses

Quote from: greencalx on July 05, 2021, 07:23:29 PM
Is that the very first episode "Gas"? I watched that with my brother when it first aired.

We have the first series on DVD. It's very slow moving, basically one accident per episode and lots of Charlie and Duffy smoking in the staff room and talking to each other with cod Bristle accents.


I thought the paramedic one was Josh maybe early - mid 90s. He then developed a gambling problem. Might be wrong though. I stopped watching rwgularly when I left home in 92. Up until then Casualty and London's Burning were must-see in our house.

London's Burning - very similar with one accident per episode and full of dead good issues.


badaids

I was part of a betting sweepstake at my school, where we'd bet 20p on how many deaths there would be in that week's casualty plus a special 5p bet on what the most gruesome death would be.  We'd work out the form by reading the Radio Times listing.

Natnar

Quote from: paruses on July 05, 2021, 08:24:42 PM
I thought the paramedic one was Josh maybe early - mid 90s. He then developed a gambling problem. Might be wrong though. I stopped watching rwgularly when I left home in 92. Up until then Casualty and London's Burning were must-see in our house.

London's Burning - very similar with one accident per episode and full of dead good issues.

Yeah the paramedic was Josh.