Emergency - Ward 10

1 9 5 7 - 1 9 6 7  (UK)

Emergency - Ward 10 was ITV's first twice-weekly serial (shown on Tuesdays and Fridays). Yet it came about almost by accident. In 1957, Tessa Diamond, then a lowly £15-a-week Associated Television continuity writer, casually suggested to her boss that 'something about doctors and nurses' might fill an empty 7.30pm slot. 

Tessa, a doctors daughter, dreamed up a hospital called the Oxbridge and a six-week serial called Calling Nurse Roberts. The racier Emergency - Ward 10 title was subsequently chosen, but the emergencies were never as important as the romantic entanglements of the handsome doctors and pert young nurses.

The medical staff included Charles Tingwell as surgeon Alan Dawson, 21-year-old John Alderton as Dr Richard Moore, Jill Browne (who became Mrs Alderton) as Sister Carole Young, John Carlisle as Dr Lester Large, Ray Barrett as Dr Don Nolan, Desmond Carrington as Dr Chris Anderson and Richard Thorp as Dr Rennie. Thorp, later to star as Alan Turner in Emmerdale Farm, was once invited to watch a real operation but had to leave halfway through - shortly before he fainted.

Among those playing patients were Albert Finney, Ian Hendry and Joanna Lumley. Indeed, the patients at Oxbridge were remarkably healthy and fortunate. The number of deaths per year was set at five (later reduced to two), and no worrying or incurable illnesses were allowed.  The writers did occasionally tug heart-strings - When the wife and baby of Dr Anderson died in a flood, tearful viewers protested in droves.

The series won praise in a British Medical Association report for allaying people's fears about hospitals, and in 1962 Enoch Powell (then Minister of Health) congratulated the soap on its 500th edition and commented on the useful job it did in reminding the public of the need for immunisation. There were critics in the medical world too - A Manchester St John's Ambulance Brigade commissioner banned his cadets from watching it because, he claimed, it portrayed nurses as 'feather-headed flippertigibbets'.

When the fashion changed to hour-long dramas in he 1960s, the weekly Call Oxbridge 2000 took over the same fictitious setting and some of the same characters. The plugs were finally pulled in 1967 when old age and weakness in the ratings area were diagnosed - an action subsequently re-diagnosed by ATV chief Lew Grade as one of the his worst mistakes.

TRIVIA NOTE
A movie version, Life In Emergency Ward 10, was released in 1960 to little effect.