Emergency - Ward 10
1 9 5 7 - 1 9 6 7 (UK)
966 x 30 minute episodes
50 x 60 minute episodes
 Emergency
- Ward 10 was Britain's first medical soap. It was also the
first of the nation's twice-weekly serials (shown on Tuesdays and
Fridays) and started life as Calling Nurse Roberts, a
six-week filler series by ATV staff writer, Tessa Diamond.
Set in the fictitious surroundings of Oxbridge General
Hospital, the series was an instant hit with a million viewers
tuning in to the first episode in February 1957.
Running for ten years (and reaching number 2 in the ratings in
1960 and boasting 16 million viewers by 1962) it made stars out of
the actors and actresses who walked its wards, not least of all
Jill Browne, who played pin-up nurse (later Sister) Carole Young.
The patients at Oxbridge were remarkably healthy and fortunate
as no worrying or incurable illnesses were allowed.
Although the series was high in drama it also had a very low
mortality rate (patient deaths were strictly limited to five per
year - later reduced to two), concentrating more on the lives of
the doctors and nurses who staffed the hospital.
These included Dr. John Nolan and surgeon Alan Dawson (played
by Australian Charles Tingwell). Dr. John Rennie was played by
Richard Thorp (who would later go on to star in another long
running soap, Emmerdale Farm,
as despised estate manager Alan Turner) and 21-year old John
Alderton joined the cast in 1963 as Dr. Richard Moone. Alderton
later married his co-star Jill Browne.
Other actors who went on to star in other long running TV
serials included Blake's Seven
stalwart Paul Darrow and Jane Rossington from Crossroads
.
The long list of patients who received treatment within EW10's
walls included Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney.
 But the writers did tug heart-strings on occasion - When the
wife and baby of Dr Anderson died in a flood, tearful viewers
protested in droves.
The series also won praise in a British
Medical Association report for allaying people's fear of
hospitals, and in 1962 Enoch Powell (then Minister of Health)
congratulated the show on its 500th episode and commented on the
useful job it did in reminding the public of the need for
immunization.
Emergency - Ward 10 had it's detractors also - A
Manchester St John's Ambulance Brigade commissioner banned his
cadets from watching the show , claiming it portrayed nurses as
"feather-headed flibbertigibbets".
There was a 1958 full-length feature film, Life in Emergency
Ward 10, and a brief spin-off series called Call Oxbridge
2000, but in 1967, with ratings beginning to fall, ATV Sir Lew
Grade pulled the plug on the hospitals life support.
Grade later admitted it was "one of the two biggest
mistakes of my life", and in 1972 he tried to revive the
series as General Hospital
(not to be confused with the long-running
US series of the same name).
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