After 38 years, Charlie Fairhead has retired from the medical wards of the TV drama Casualty. Welcome back to the real world, actor Derek Thompson
For those in whose lives they have been a fixture, the departure of a familiar character from a long-running television series can seem almost like a bereavement. So it is with Charlie Fairhead, who left the BBC One hospital drama Casualty on Saturday at the climax of a classic two-parter. Over 38 years as a nurse at the accident and emergency department of Holby city hospital, Charlie had survived a shooting, an embolism and a couple of heart attacks. Such misadventures had merely enabled Derek Thompson, the actor who has played him for nearly 900 episodes, to take restorative breaks. But Charlie’s stabbing by a patient meant farewell – and a decision to retire.
Barring the death or serious indisposition of the actors involved, one can never be absolutely sure a character is gone. Just consider the succession who have made miraculous recoveries over the decades in EastEnders or Coronation Street. Thompson is about to start a new life as a retired police officer with a dodgy past in Blue Lights, set in his native city Belfast. But it looks as if this really is the end for Charlie, whose departure, on top of a reduction in the number of episodes a year, seems as ominous for the future of Casualty as the ravens abandoning the Tower of London.
