BBC One medical drama Casualty is currently off air. Initially, the show was set to return to our screens at the end of this year but now, things have changed.
The final episode of the show’s boxset Supply and Demand aired on September 20, and featured Ngozi Okoye (Adesuwa Oni) getting rushed to hospital after relapsing.
Prior to this, Ngozi had said goodbye to her friends at Holby City Hospital to return to Lagos. Her young son Obi previously told Ngozi that he wasn’t happy in England anymore, and wanted to go home.
Despite her relationship challenges with Nicole Piper (Sammy T Dobson), Ngozi had grown to love life at Holby and didn’t want to leave, but chose to do so for her son.
At the airport, Ngozi anxiously waited for her plane to get called. While this was happening, Nicole was chatting to Siobhan McKenzie (Melanie Hill). She had decided that she wanted to be with Ngozi after all, and needed to get to the airport before she left.
Siobhan raced Nicole across town, but a traffic jam outside the airport meant she was forced to run the rest of the way.
When Nicole arrived though, she found Obi on his own. In the toilets, Ngozi had fallen and hit her head after relapsing. Flashback scenes then confirmed Ngozi hid in the bathroom to try and miss the flight. After Nicole found her, Ngozi was rushed into the ED.
The instalment ended just as the team were continuing CPR on Ngozi. At first, fans believed they would have to wait until December 27 to find out Ngozi’s fate but following a new update, they’re going to have to wait even longer.
Casualty is expected to return on January 10 now, after the Christmas and New Year TV viewings. The next mini series is called Learning Curve, and will allow us to learn if Ngozi survived her fall.
One person who may struggle in the aftermath of this is Dylan Keogh (William Beck), who worked as Ngozi’s sponsor throughout her storyline.
Last month, Will Beck spoke to me about what could happen with Dylan if Ngozi doesn’t pull through.
‘He’s going to want to be involved. He’s going to want to get to the bottom of what went wrong, if something went wrong’, he said.
‘Her struggles are very intense, and they’re very hard on both her and her son. The people around her want her to be at peace. I don’t know, if the worst came to the worse, there may be a degree of comfort in that.
‘He just needs to reach out for support. Whatever place he finds himself in, I think it’s going to be a measure of just how well he’s adjusted.’
Earlier this year, the BBC revealed that Casualty had been put out to competitive tendering, a process that will decide which producer makes the show – though the BBC will retain all the rights for the programme.
While this development won’t impact the future of the medical drama, it will change the foundations of the series. Casualty is set in the Emergency Department of Holby City Hospital, but this won’t be the case once the new production company takes over.
It means the ED will be set in Wales, rather than the fictional city of Holby.
Will is looking forward to seeing what happens next with Casualty, once this process has been completed.
‘It’s going to be really exciting. Those parameters we have been given, to fulfill, are really exciting and I think unprecedented’, he explained.
‘EastEnders is the same age as us. What they’ve achieved is incredible, but we were not conceived as a soap or continuing drama.
‘We don’t satisfy the genre rules, we have too many guest cast, so this reimagining that’s taking place at the moment, that’s a great way of saying that’s 40 years in the bank, let’s look to the next 40.’
He added: ‘What we will have on the other side of it is a huge opportunity. Three years, at least, to demonstrate that not just the creatives that we have here, but that Wales is going to be a place that offers drama, set as it so happens in Wales.
‘That’s so exciting, to be making a show that happens to be set in a place with so much potential.’
