Accident of the Week

The Autumn TV season must be upon us - Casualty returned to the BBC last weekend for a new series. After nearly a quarter of a century on our screens, you'd think that they'd be running out of bizarre medical emergencies to base each episode around. Actually,I have to admit that my favourite part of episode is the elaborate opening set-up, when we meet some group of unfamiliar characters engaged in some kind of situation which you just know will culminate in one or more of them being horribly maimed in an inventive fashion. These scenes always contain clues as to the nature of the forthcoming 'accident of the week' - if the characters are outdoors, thee might be a mechanical hay-baler in the background, or a motorised lawn mower, perhaps. It's no safer indoors. Anything could be dangerous in the kitchen, for instance - gonads caught in a sandwich toaster, or severe scaldings with pans of porridge, let alone the potential threats posed by food mixers and fridges.

Naturally, I have my own ideas as to how the series could be spiced up - not that the BBC are interested, of course. It was the same when I sent them those suggestions as to how they could capitalise on the death of a contestant on Noel's Late, Late Breakfast Show back in the 1980s. Did they thank me when I proposed that the show should be rechristened the Late, Late Viewer Show, and feature contestants receiving deadly challenges from Noel Edmonds via the 'Whirly Wheel of Death'? No, they bloody well didn't. They didn't return that miniature, fully working, mock up of the 'Whirly Wheel of Death' I sent them - it feature challenges such as 'boiled alive', 'eaten by cannibals' and the 'Ted Moult double glazing challenge', in which a contestant stood behind a sheet of Everest double glazing while Mike Smith fired both barrels of a shotgun at them.

However, getting back to my proposals for Casualty, I have suggested to producers that they might like to include a storyline in which a lorry carrying artifacts from the British Museum to an exhibition in Holby is involved in a horrific motorway crash. An Egyptian mummy is thrown clear of the vehicle, and found by paramedics who assume it is a victim of the crash and take it to the casualty department. Once there, finding the body has no pulse, Charlie attempts to restart its heart with the crash trolley. The mummy is revived and proceeds to go on a rampage around the hospital. Romantic complications ensue when it mistakes nurse Jessica for the reincarnation of its lost love, a long dead Princess of the Nile, and tries to whisk her away from her partner, Dr Trueman. Luckily, paramedic Jeff finds the Scroll of Thoth in the back of his ambulance - dropped by an injured and delirious museum curator - and porter Big Mac remembers from a documentary he saw on the Discovery Channel that reading from it can stop living mummys in their tracks. Unfortunately, he can't read hieroglyphics, but the curator whose life Adam has just saved can, and the mummy ends up tearing itself to shreds. All-in-all, I'd say that would be a far more realistic portrayal of the challenges faced by today's NHS than the usual catalogue of cardiac arrests, tropical diseases and amputations they usually deal with every week in Casualty.