Whoever it was that first suggested all good things must come to an end has clearly never watched a soap opera. The thing about soaps is that they tend not to end, but rather continue on, often in the face of eroding interest and diminishing viewers, simply because it’s too painful to pull the plug on a national institution.

But, last week, it was announced that Derek Thompson, the actor who has played Charlie Fairhead on BBC One’s longest-running medical drama Casualty, was bowing out after 38 years’ service. Much as with real-life hospitals, Casualty has long had an open-door policy with regard to its “staff” (read: “actors”), some of them coming in and then departing so swiftly that we barely remember them at all, much less mourn their passing.
But with Charlie it’s different, and Casualty will likely suffer for it. Charlie Fairhead was an anomaly within the hospital ward: not just a friendly face, but an enduring one. He was, simply, always there. Given the length of his tenure, it’s likely that he oversaw colic in toddlers who then grew up, moved away, came back and developed midlife illnesses which he was still there to help treat.

His retirement can hardly come as a surprise, given that the actor that plays him is 75 years old, and that Charlie himself can’t be much younger. Frankly, it’s a wonder he lasted so long, because if medical staff tend to burn out quickly then their television equivalents invariably have targets on their chests.

Charlie certainly did. Since he arrived at Holby City in the autumn of 1986, he has clocked up over 900 episodes. Most of his shifts likely passed without incident, it’s true, but the ones that were particularly memorable were dutifully highlighted on BBC One over countless Saturday nights.
He’s been shot in the chest, run over by an ambulance on his wedding day, been plunged into a harbour, locked inside a car and, most recently, stabbed in the stomach. His superiors have been summarily rude to him, patients even ruder. That he has been held hostage once is unfortunate; the fact that it’s happened twice suggests a certain carelessness on his part.

Read Next

He has nevertheless aged remarkably well. He’s endured romance, heartbreak and marriage – to another long-running cast member, Cathy Shipton’s comparably lovely Duffy – and then had to watch as Duffy suffered an early onset dementia that advanced so rapidly the character had to be written out of the show, leaving Charlie alone and bereft, but limping ever on.

It’s easy to overlook those that are always there, but Charlie’s presence on Casualty was one of the main reasons we continued to tune in. In a confusing and hostile world – in a world of streaming, too – it’s nice to see a friendly, familiar face, especially in someone wearing scrubs. Medical dramas can tend towards the abjectly terrifying. Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt, for example, focused largely on those hassled medics who only ever considered their day-to-day patients a collective thorn in their side. Charlie was a safe port in a torrential storm.
With his departure, then, the show faces a, well, a medical emergency. Who could possibly replace him in our affections, and do viewers even have the patience to learn to love someone else in his stead? One doesn’t step into a role whose shoes have been worn consistently by the same person for almost 40 years. The fit’s all wrong, nothing feels right any more; we switch over, or switch off.

The medical world thrives on new blood, of course – often literally. But without Charlie, the prognosis for Casualty is terminal.