Editorial: After 38 years, Charlie Fairhead has retired from the medical wards of the TV drama Casualty. Welcome back to the real world, actor Derek Thompson
After 38 years, Charlie Fairhead has retired from the medical wards of the TV drama Casualty. Welcome back to the real world, actor Derek Thompsonor 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, who left the BBC One hospital drama Casualty on Saturday at the climax of a classic two-parter.
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 madeover 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, set in his native city Belfast.
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’sMr Salt was working at Bristol Royal Infirmary when the show’s two young creators invited themselves in to research it.
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, becameactors 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.
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