I don't get why Casualty writers don't "get" Connie. It's a shame she has been ruined because she was one of the best ever characters in Holby City.
See I prefer Connie to Rita any day. But people I know who never seen Connie in Holby dont get Connie and just think she is a bitch and prefer Rita; god knows why Rita is a rude loud mouth horrid character played by a terrible actress.
Connie has no right to blame Rita for her husband, its personal and Connie is looking for someone to blame regarding her failures and Rita is the one. So is Lily going to have an accident? The changes by Connie is going to end badly
I hope Charlie steps in and end the Connie/Rita War
I love both Connie and Rita, but with the way Connie is being written recently is starting to make her unlikeable and I don't want her to regress any further. I found myself siding with Rita tonight! I agree with the above, however - Charlie needs to sort them out as I can see Connie/Rita developing a nice friendship in the future.
Connie's not only awful but also rather stupid.
Her staff clearly can't cope with her new regime, but she 'd rather risk their health than admit her mistake. She's meant to be a doctor, yet apparently doesn't know the effect that too little sleep, too much work and missing meals can have on a human body. Fainting is not something you do on purpose for someone else's inconvenience, so a reprimand is just callous.
And it seems that she'd rather be at work, where people hate her, than with a daughter who presumably loves her.
Connie's not only awful but also rather stupid.
Her staff clearly can't cope with her new regime, but she 'd rather risk their health than admit her mistake. She's meant to be a doctor, yet apparently doesn't know the effect that too little sleep, too much work and missing meals can have on a human body. Fainting is not something you do on purpose for someone else's inconvenience, so a reprimand is just callous.
And it seems that she'd rather be at work, where people hate her, than with a daughter who presumably loves her.
Also, why wasn't she helping out in the dept rather than offering to take an old man she hardly knows back to his care home?
If she cared so much about standards and targets then you think she'd muck in a bit and help.
Indeed, but the Bristol operation ended in 2011 - they could have and probably should have moved the whole Holby operation to Elstree then and sent something else to Cardiff - it's not as if as the base for Doctor Who amongst other things, they needed that much more of a boost (incidentally there are no major production centres in Scotland so we get stuck with game-shows and daytime pap and the horror that is Mrs Brown's Boys which is now that Waterloo Road's gone, the only thing regularly made by BBC Scotland that goes to the whole network in drama or comedy but that's another matter).
Keeping Casualty and Holby City separate adds an extra level of complexity to what is supposed to be the same hospital and a lack of creative focus to an already less than ideal set of Corporation-level circumstances and makes it that much harder for even a first-rate EP to give an adequate level of attention to both and with the continual commute that involves, something is going to give. Evidently there was a political calculation about sending a flagship show to a Celtic part of the country - how else can you explain dispatching the now defunct Waterloo Road set in Rochdale was it, to Greenock? Madness! (My mother is a devotee and even she admits that hasn't added anything.)
I just don't think keeping the two shows on two separate parts of the country has really done the franchise good in the round.
Sorry but why the hell does it make a difference whether anything is done or filmed in a "Celtic part of the country" - I really don't see how Wales's Celtic heritage has anything to do with Casualty being filmed here century's later..?
I am compelled to find some logic in the madness (and my beloved Queen of the South FC just got knocked out of the Scottish Cup, so I am not in the best mood), so forgive me –
Yes, we all do want the show to do social content, to grapple with the state of the NHS. Fine, but the price is sitting through some of the least subtle, most ‘smack about the head’ rubbish around. If they only way to do it is to present a straight up black and white Evil Boss versus Sullen Underdog, then why am I paying my licence-fee? These are not the people to deliver anything more than soft and fluffy and that’s maybe not a bad thing on a Saturday night – maybe a move to Tuesday night and do a Holby double-bill might be a good thing?
Now I am going to be blunt – you cannot run hospital admissions targets of 4-hours and an increasing number of ever-more complex admissions (although with the extras you wouldn’t know that) without something giving – that’s why so many hospitals are failing. You cannot operate the same training system in a comparable duration as you once did with Working Time Directives in-place. The pre-2005 training system (which did its job) pushed hard, particularly pre-1998, removing those less resilient from the critical departments, redirecting them into less vital hospital-work or as GPs and it did so by testing the endurance of those involved. Effectively they are combining more work into less time and operating an assembly-line. No point in moaning about it. It is fact. Have a problem with that – pay more taxes, end of. Besides, if the system were about to collapse the Government would be forced to admit reality and do as they always do when the s**t really hits the fan and call in the Armed Forces – to do the work for the civilians and on less pay and few employment rights. What we are expecting of our NHS within the terms we are prepared to allow our politicians to provide is unsustainable. No point in living in Fantasy Land where staff turn-up and spend half their time either moaning to/romancing each other or gossiping. Getting upset about it isn’t really going to help. Yes, being harshly treated by a boss is horrible, but a) this is Life and Death, too important to be nice about it and b) it would help if this was a stronger group of characters – or at least ones where I didn’t see where the likely criticism were coming from (Man Child, No-Empathy and Old Woman).
It would have helped if there was some kind of dialogue link-up with Holby City – it would have provided much needed context. There’s been a recent plotline where the Darwin CNM Jonny has been at war with CEO Selfie regarding Theatre over-use undermining system resilience in the case of emergencies which has led to a patient’s death. If Self is demanding such things of Surgery, of course he’s demanding them of Emergency and Acute services and guess who after the seeming savaging of the Inspection (of which Robyn being an idiot with a flash-drive, Cal being a Man Child Lothario and Rita being rubbish at running her Nursing staff can’t have been minor factors), Mrs B won’t be in any political position to say ‘no’? I suspect the bad temper and the inflexibility is as much about despair as it is anything else – a howl of “you had a year to sort yourselves out, you didn’t.” Of course the Bosses on her like a tonne of bricks for a bad inspection – it affects their statistics and possibly the rating of their hospital, its likely her reputation that’s saving her and the ED from something worse and Selfie does have a tendency to stab supposed allies in the back or other-wise let them down when it suits him – Colette Sheward comes to mind, his best friend when the going was good, left pissing in the wind when it gets tough. It is anyway a classic response to over-correct – Self wants big changes, more efficiencies and more training, so she’s giving him that and more – but it does tell you one vital thing, who will wilt and who won’t and whether Rita will surprise us all and actually do her job. Doesn’t mean I like it though. a) Is it me or is it not the Nurse and HCA team’s job to monitor a patient to enforce a nil by mouth? and b) she's prickly about Connie intruding on Nurses' working and then sticks her nose into when Doctors can work? Okay, and that's not hypocritical, regardless of whether its right or not. There's a problem here with basic command and control – command on a warship is always given to the person trained to ‘fight the ship’ i.e. the Weapons specialist. Command in a Hospital ward de facto, for insurance, the Consultant’s in-charge, end of. The Consultant is trained to make decisions in a way the Nurse simply isn't. So why are they deliberately muddying the waters? It’s Connie who looses her job or gets sued (again) if somebody dies and a good reason cannot be found. Lily, eat, have a kip in the On-Call Room, finish your shift and then don’t drive home – you don’t have to.
Okay, so Connie is Alexis Carrington with a medical degree – we get that, don’t give us a storyline where she is shown being kind and generous with her time and then deliberately undermine it within a couple of minutes – make up your minds. Either she’s an out and out villain we can love to hate (which is problematic at best) or portray balance, you can’t have both. There are better ways of doing it, many better ways, this is I think representative of the Connie Problem I roughly sketched in on my last post. A total disconnect between the idea of what they wanted to do with the character, what I think a lot of people assumed they were getting to start with and the execution required to pull it off in a manner entertaining to the audience. Yes, there are also better ways to act and be – they both march around like petulant children, Rita because she is too ineffectual to achieve her definition of success (I reckon Tess knows what side her bread is buttered on and can guess how this will end) and Connie because this place is the only thing she has left of any real purpose in her life (and in which she actually believes – she had no support-network, she could not fulfil her job and be a parent without help she didn’t really have) and because she can no longer maintain the clinical detachment she feels she needs to practice medicine. She cannot be the usual cool, calm, collected self; the slow drip, drip of disaster this last six months or so has seen to that. Of course the usual semi-Vulcan face has gone. Oh and Mrs B has a point – Rita has a track-record of iffy judgement, forget the drinking – if Connie could prove that (she might suspect), she’d have been gone months ago – a key point, she should have reported her husband’s presence on hospital grounds to Security immediately she became aware to cover her own back and that whole day simply played into the Strachan’s hands making Grace living with her father in New York inevitable, which likely would have made a lifelong enemy of Rita anyway, rational or not. I am still convinced something more has to have happened with Sam than just a dispute over access, I wondered whether they got together and broke-up again and we are seeing the long, drawn-out effects of a really ugly break-up on an emotionally scarred individual - that would at least explain why Connie's gotten not been firing on all thrusters really since she first arrived. She’s just not had her usual finesse and it’s just become unavoidable. Applying logic, it’s also possible to argue that given that she is a fish-out-of-water in a second, less comfortable specialty, she’s relying more heavily on her past experience, with the cut-throat world of Surgery, rather than a more collegiate ED approach she didn’t experience as a Registrar.
A good bit of peacekeeping is well needed – Charlie’s absence is obvious, his Kofi Annan-quality being the strength of the character. Again, Zoe’s limited screen-time is hurting them because a few plain words here could be very beneficial. Dylan or Tess putting with plain-speaking too – since she actually respects them, could achieve something too, if that was TPTB's purpose rather than the object lesson in what not to do we are being presented with to suit an agenda of playing to the soap opera crowd.
Part of this comes down to Trust and that in itself requires a different post to discuss….
Very little else is actually worth speaking about here except please, please, please don’t ruin Lofty too!
I agree about the link up with Holby City - it would make more sense if Connie's new regimes were to do with Guy's new schedules rather than the department's inspection.
Did anyone else find the Lofty scratch card stuff a bit random? It was either just a random part in the script to create a reason for Lofty to have extra money to spend on something and therefore make Robyn think it was romantic in some way, or it's the start of a gambling storyline. I'd prefer the latter. If they did go down this route again, I'd hope that it would be executed better than the pathetic Fletch storyline.
I think its a combination of the Inspection, her casting around for Hail Mary solutions and Guy putting pressure that will create a Perfect Storm - sorry to use that phrase in two different posts in one week. It's just really badly executed. It might help explain why we are promised
Guy stepping down as CEO to be replaced by Connie's old sparring-partner the fabulous Henrik Hansen
Certainly some link-up would have made it seem less dreadful than it is - I really shouldn't be dreading episodes the way I am now, should I?
Sorry but why the hell does it make a difference whether anything is done or filmed in a "Celtic part of the country" - I really don't see how Wales's Celtic heritage has anything to do with Casualty being filmed here century's later..?
Forgive me, I didn't put it very well.
It shouldn't, other than the distance between the production base and anywhere that isn't Elstree requiring a degree of travelling which will inevitably make it harder for Oliver Kent to do his job better than he does it now given that tonight's episode, for example, could really have done with the sort of creative coordination between two sets of production teams that can only really occur when you share a site.
I am a Scot, as far as production is concerned, we might as well not exist. It is unavoidable that there are huge politics involved in-terms of where money is spent, about whether or not the parts that are not South East of England are getting their fair share of commissions, development opportunities etc. Cardiff has done very well out of this indeed, the development of Cardiff facilities and those at Salford was intended to correct and presumably one of the key reasons why Casualty ended up in Cardiff - to give it a 'big money' production the whole country would see, partly for political reasons.
Of course, the knock-on effect though of the heavy-development of Cardiff and some traditional issues about the sorts of material that the BBC network usually commissioned from the non-English parts of the country, risks having a detremental affect on other parts and definitely will have from the perspective of Pacific Quay - we offer up only Mrs Brown's Boys now on a regular basis. This is only exaserbated by the fact that the Scots are now the only part of the UK without a proper studio (which in itself is a loooong saga), have an underdeveloped ITV franchise (STV) which is not part of ITV Plc which means they have to buy programming in from the rest of ITV (minus my neck of the woods, caught by Border-Tyne Tees TV aka 'English Telly' which covers Dumfries and Galloway and Scottish Borders, we are in with Cumbria, Northumbria, Tyne Tees, County Durham, bits of north Lancashire and the Isle of Man which makes local news broadcasting hellish - they did very well on the Referendum though having to cover three perspectives) which I don't think sells anything to the rest of the network and once used to be rather daring back when Grampian (Aberdeen and Dundee) was still a separate franchise. There is also little prospect of further investment (given the likelihood of the SNP being successful in the next 10 to 20 years, and that might be an optimistic assessment, particularly if right-wing parties do well elsewhere in May - and I say that as somebody who knew they were going to vote 'No' more than two years before September), investing in television in Scotland is probably a rather unsafe bet.
Cardiff, Salford and Belfast only stand to win in this context. Cardiff disproportionately so because they had a headstart with drama-production back around 2005 with Doctor Who and because the BBC have chosen to invest there. BBC Scotland makes the Lottery Shows and children's TV (Balamory, Raven etc), but often has to so elsewhere.
Perhaps I wasn't precise enough - its about logistics and practicalities - with a dash of how integrated people who live in Ayrshire, South Lanarkshire and Midlothian and north now actually are in the cultural life of the country if they had to use a Sky Box just to see Downton and we aren't really making anything shared by the rest of the UK, but that's by the by. We have long-term bug-bears about having to search the schedules for Holby City because that moves up here to make way for Glasgow-based nonsense you guys don't get to see called River City.
Connie is a vile bitch and deserved a slap off Rita and im waiting for the day she looses her job
You may have to wait a while . Amanda Mealing isn't leaving Casualty. I was annoyed with Connie yesterday but she's hurting deep down. She lost Grace and her father died in the ED. Hopefully she will be nicer soon. Amanda Mealing is a very good actress
It's not like Connie's perfect herself. She didn't know that her patient had Myasthenia gravis - and didn't seem at all sorry at not knowing or not having read the notes. She was far too busy ingratiating herself in front of her hero. In no other circumstances would the head of a department leave to provide transport for a frail patient, and I suspect Connie would be the first to criticise, and discipline, anyone who tried.
You may have to wait a while . Amanda Mealing isn't leaving Casualty. I was annoyed with Connie yesterday but she's hurting deep down. She lost Grace and her father died in the ED. :
Agreed. But that doesn't give her the right to ruin other people's lives. She's not managing her staff - she's running them into the ground. She doesn't actually care about them - only about results and making herself look good.
Agreed. But that doesn't give her the right to ruin other people's lives. She's not managing her staff - she's running them into the ground. She doesn't actually care about them - only about results and making herself look good.
Yep I agree with that. Connie is not a people person and she has got to change her ways. Connie does care about Zoe and Charlie but she needs to snap out of it and support the junior doctors. I'm hoping Charlie will have another go at Connie because she seems to listen to him.
I enjoyed the episode, although Connie's rant about Rita's incompetence didn't quite ring true. I don't like Rita, but she didn't do much wrong this week.
I enjoyed the episode, although Connie's rant about Rita's incompetence didn't quite ring true. I don't like Rita, but she didn't do much wrong this week.
I'm already planning on employing his 'Do I look like I care? That's because I don't' at some stage in the next week. It turns out fictional ED consulting has some overlap with real-world teaching in a secondary school.
I'm already planning on employing his 'Do I look like I care? That's because I don't' at some stage in the next week. It turns out fictional ED consulting has some overlap with real-world teaching in a secondary school.
Good episode, apart from the Connie stuff. She expects her staff to work themselves into exhaustion, yet she thinks it's OK to take time off at the drop of a hat - then she kicks off when work delays her! Hypocritical, not least because she wouldn't allow Lily to go home, when she obviously needed to!
Nice to see Lily being given a storyline (I felt so sorry for her), and I thought the scene with Max and Zoe in bed with Dylan's dog was great!
Also, loving Dylan! Great stuff, especially when he stood up to Connie!
Lofty and the scratchcards. Is he going to become a scratchcard addict? Or maybe he already is one! Nice scenes with him and Robyn.
Comments
See I prefer Connie to Rita any day. But people I know who never seen Connie in Holby dont get Connie and just think she is a bitch and prefer Rita; god knows why Rita is a rude loud mouth horrid character played by a terrible actress.
Connie has no right to blame Rita for her husband, its personal and Connie is looking for someone to blame regarding her failures and Rita is the one. So is Lily going to have an accident? The changes by Connie is going to end badly
I hope Charlie steps in and end the Connie/Rita War
I like the whole package, looks....and his bizarre personality
And poor Lily!
Her staff clearly can't cope with her new regime, but she 'd rather risk their health than admit her mistake. She's meant to be a doctor, yet apparently doesn't know the effect that too little sleep, too much work and missing meals can have on a human body. Fainting is not something you do on purpose for someone else's inconvenience, so a reprimand is just callous.
And it seems that she'd rather be at work, where people hate her, than with a daughter who presumably loves her.
Also, why wasn't she helping out in the dept rather than offering to take an old man she hardly knows back to his care home?
If she cared so much about standards and targets then you think she'd muck in a bit and help.
Sorry but why the hell does it make a difference whether anything is done or filmed in a "Celtic part of the country" - I really don't see how Wales's Celtic heritage has anything to do with Casualty being filmed here century's later..?
Don't know why she felt that guy was more important than her department. After tonight I am team Rita.
Yes, we all do want the show to do social content, to grapple with the state of the NHS. Fine, but the price is sitting through some of the least subtle, most ‘smack about the head’ rubbish around. If they only way to do it is to present a straight up black and white Evil Boss versus Sullen Underdog, then why am I paying my licence-fee? These are not the people to deliver anything more than soft and fluffy and that’s maybe not a bad thing on a Saturday night – maybe a move to Tuesday night and do a Holby double-bill might be a good thing?
Now I am going to be blunt – you cannot run hospital admissions targets of 4-hours and an increasing number of ever-more complex admissions (although with the extras you wouldn’t know that) without something giving – that’s why so many hospitals are failing. You cannot operate the same training system in a comparable duration as you once did with Working Time Directives in-place. The pre-2005 training system (which did its job) pushed hard, particularly pre-1998, removing those less resilient from the critical departments, redirecting them into less vital hospital-work or as GPs and it did so by testing the endurance of those involved. Effectively they are combining more work into less time and operating an assembly-line. No point in moaning about it. It is fact. Have a problem with that – pay more taxes, end of. Besides, if the system were about to collapse the Government would be forced to admit reality and do as they always do when the s**t really hits the fan and call in the Armed Forces – to do the work for the civilians and on less pay and few employment rights. What we are expecting of our NHS within the terms we are prepared to allow our politicians to provide is unsustainable. No point in living in Fantasy Land where staff turn-up and spend half their time either moaning to/romancing each other or gossiping. Getting upset about it isn’t really going to help. Yes, being harshly treated by a boss is horrible, but a) this is Life and Death, too important to be nice about it and b) it would help if this was a stronger group of characters – or at least ones where I didn’t see where the likely criticism were coming from (Man Child, No-Empathy and Old Woman).
It would have helped if there was some kind of dialogue link-up with Holby City – it would have provided much needed context. There’s been a recent plotline where the Darwin CNM Jonny has been at war with CEO Selfie regarding Theatre over-use undermining system resilience in the case of emergencies which has led to a patient’s death. If Self is demanding such things of Surgery, of course he’s demanding them of Emergency and Acute services and guess who after the seeming savaging of the Inspection (of which Robyn being an idiot with a flash-drive, Cal being a Man Child Lothario and Rita being rubbish at running her Nursing staff can’t have been minor factors), Mrs B won’t be in any political position to say ‘no’? I suspect the bad temper and the inflexibility is as much about despair as it is anything else – a howl of “you had a year to sort yourselves out, you didn’t.” Of course the Bosses on her like a tonne of bricks for a bad inspection – it affects their statistics and possibly the rating of their hospital, its likely her reputation that’s saving her and the ED from something worse and Selfie does have a tendency to stab supposed allies in the back or other-wise let them down when it suits him – Colette Sheward comes to mind, his best friend when the going was good, left pissing in the wind when it gets tough. It is anyway a classic response to over-correct – Self wants big changes, more efficiencies and more training, so she’s giving him that and more – but it does tell you one vital thing, who will wilt and who won’t and whether Rita will surprise us all and actually do her job. Doesn’t mean I like it though. a) Is it me or is it not the Nurse and HCA team’s job to monitor a patient to enforce a nil by mouth? and b) she's prickly about Connie intruding on Nurses' working and then sticks her nose into when Doctors can work? Okay, and that's not hypocritical, regardless of whether its right or not. There's a problem here with basic command and control – command on a warship is always given to the person trained to ‘fight the ship’ i.e. the Weapons specialist. Command in a Hospital ward de facto, for insurance, the Consultant’s in-charge, end of. The Consultant is trained to make decisions in a way the Nurse simply isn't. So why are they deliberately muddying the waters? It’s Connie who looses her job or gets sued (again) if somebody dies and a good reason cannot be found. Lily, eat, have a kip in the On-Call Room, finish your shift and then don’t drive home – you don’t have to.
Okay, so Connie is Alexis Carrington with a medical degree – we get that, don’t give us a storyline where she is shown being kind and generous with her time and then deliberately undermine it within a couple of minutes – make up your minds. Either she’s an out and out villain we can love to hate (which is problematic at best) or portray balance, you can’t have both. There are better ways of doing it, many better ways, this is I think representative of the Connie Problem I roughly sketched in on my last post. A total disconnect between the idea of what they wanted to do with the character, what I think a lot of people assumed they were getting to start with and the execution required to pull it off in a manner entertaining to the audience. Yes, there are also better ways to act and be – they both march around like petulant children, Rita because she is too ineffectual to achieve her definition of success (I reckon Tess knows what side her bread is buttered on and can guess how this will end) and Connie because this place is the only thing she has left of any real purpose in her life (and in which she actually believes – she had no support-network, she could not fulfil her job and be a parent without help she didn’t really have) and because she can no longer maintain the clinical detachment she feels she needs to practice medicine. She cannot be the usual cool, calm, collected self; the slow drip, drip of disaster this last six months or so has seen to that. Of course the usual semi-Vulcan face has gone. Oh and Mrs B has a point – Rita has a track-record of iffy judgement, forget the drinking – if Connie could prove that (she might suspect), she’d have been gone months ago – a key point, she should have reported her husband’s presence on hospital grounds to Security immediately she became aware to cover her own back and that whole day simply played into the Strachan’s hands making Grace living with her father in New York inevitable, which likely would have made a lifelong enemy of Rita anyway, rational or not. I am still convinced something more has to have happened with Sam than just a dispute over access, I wondered whether they got together and broke-up again and we are seeing the long, drawn-out effects of a really ugly break-up on an emotionally scarred individual - that would at least explain why Connie's gotten not been firing on all thrusters really since she first arrived. She’s just not had her usual finesse and it’s just become unavoidable. Applying logic, it’s also possible to argue that given that she is a fish-out-of-water in a second, less comfortable specialty, she’s relying more heavily on her past experience, with the cut-throat world of Surgery, rather than a more collegiate ED approach she didn’t experience as a Registrar.
A good bit of peacekeeping is well needed – Charlie’s absence is obvious, his Kofi Annan-quality being the strength of the character. Again, Zoe’s limited screen-time is hurting them because a few plain words here could be very beneficial. Dylan or Tess putting with plain-speaking too – since she actually respects them, could achieve something too, if that was TPTB's purpose rather than the object lesson in what not to do we are being presented with to suit an agenda of playing to the soap opera crowd.
Part of this comes down to Trust and that in itself requires a different post to discuss….
Very little else is actually worth speaking about here except please, please, please don’t ruin Lofty too!
Did anyone else find the Lofty scratch card stuff a bit random? It was either just a random part in the script to create a reason for Lofty to have extra money to spend on something and therefore make Robyn think it was romantic in some way, or it's the start of a gambling storyline. I'd prefer the latter. If they did go down this route again, I'd hope that it would be executed better than the pathetic Fletch storyline.
Forgive me, I didn't put it very well.
It shouldn't, other than the distance between the production base and anywhere that isn't Elstree requiring a degree of travelling which will inevitably make it harder for Oliver Kent to do his job better than he does it now given that tonight's episode, for example, could really have done with the sort of creative coordination between two sets of production teams that can only really occur when you share a site.
I am a Scot, as far as production is concerned, we might as well not exist. It is unavoidable that there are huge politics involved in-terms of where money is spent, about whether or not the parts that are not South East of England are getting their fair share of commissions, development opportunities etc. Cardiff has done very well out of this indeed, the development of Cardiff facilities and those at Salford was intended to correct and presumably one of the key reasons why Casualty ended up in Cardiff - to give it a 'big money' production the whole country would see, partly for political reasons.
Of course, the knock-on effect though of the heavy-development of Cardiff and some traditional issues about the sorts of material that the BBC network usually commissioned from the non-English parts of the country, risks having a detremental affect on other parts and definitely will have from the perspective of Pacific Quay - we offer up only Mrs Brown's Boys now on a regular basis. This is only exaserbated by the fact that the Scots are now the only part of the UK without a proper studio (which in itself is a loooong saga), have an underdeveloped ITV franchise (STV) which is not part of ITV Plc which means they have to buy programming in from the rest of ITV (minus my neck of the woods, caught by Border-Tyne Tees TV aka 'English Telly' which covers Dumfries and Galloway and Scottish Borders, we are in with Cumbria, Northumbria, Tyne Tees, County Durham, bits of north Lancashire and the Isle of Man which makes local news broadcasting hellish - they did very well on the Referendum though having to cover three perspectives) which I don't think sells anything to the rest of the network and once used to be rather daring back when Grampian (Aberdeen and Dundee) was still a separate franchise. There is also little prospect of further investment (given the likelihood of the SNP being successful in the next 10 to 20 years, and that might be an optimistic assessment, particularly if right-wing parties do well elsewhere in May - and I say that as somebody who knew they were going to vote 'No' more than two years before September), investing in television in Scotland is probably a rather unsafe bet.
Cardiff, Salford and Belfast only stand to win in this context. Cardiff disproportionately so because they had a headstart with drama-production back around 2005 with Doctor Who and because the BBC have chosen to invest there. BBC Scotland makes the Lottery Shows and children's TV (Balamory, Raven etc), but often has to so elsewhere.
Perhaps I wasn't precise enough - its about logistics and practicalities - with a dash of how integrated people who live in Ayrshire, South Lanarkshire and Midlothian and north now actually are in the cultural life of the country if they had to use a Sky Box just to see Downton and we aren't really making anything shared by the rest of the UK, but that's by the by. We have long-term bug-bears about having to search the schedules for Holby City because that moves up here to make way for Glasgow-based nonsense you guys don't get to see called River City.
Agreed. But that doesn't give her the right to ruin other people's lives. She's not managing her staff - she's running them into the ground. She doesn't actually care about them - only about results and making herself look good.
This was my main take-away from the episode
Dylan - he's rather cute, isn't he ?
I'm already planning on employing his 'Do I look like I care? That's because I don't' at some stage in the next week. It turns out fictional ED consulting has some overlap with real-world teaching in a secondary school.
Reminds me of "am I bovvered? ..." !
I don't think so.
Nice to see Lily being given a storyline (I felt so sorry for her), and I thought the scene with Max and Zoe in bed with Dylan's dog was great!
Also, loving Dylan! Great stuff, especially when he stood up to Connie!
Lofty and the scratchcards. Is he going to become a scratchcard addict? Or maybe he already is one! Nice scenes with him and Robyn.