Gory scenes from Casualty's series 23 opener last September have been criticised by the media regulator, Ofcom, which said the episode exceeded generally accepted standards and was inappropriately scheduled.
In the special two-part episode, nurse Tess (Suzanne Packer) is impaled on a spike at a building site while searching for a patient. The patient, a young woman, subsequently films the nurse in her predicament, runs from the scene and ends up being hit by an ambulance, which sends her flying into the windscreen of an oncoming car.
Five viewers complained to Ofcom, calling the scenes "disturbing", "violent", "extremely graphic", "shocking" and "disgusting". Two complainants said their 4 and 16 year old children were upset by the content of the episodes; a third complainant, a nurse, said the scenes were "unexpected and very distressing".
In its ruling, Ofcom acknowledged that Casualty is a well-established medical drama that occasionally contains "challenging" scenes. However, it said that its pre-watershed transmission time on a Saturday evening meant that it had to consider extreme scenes carefully, especially given the high numbers of children who are watching TV during the slot.
"Ofcom was concerned by the graphic nature of the repeated scenes of the nurse impaled on the stake who was obviously in great distress, and by the aggressive impact of the accident scene filmed from the perspective of the inside of the car that the young woman was flung into at high speed," the regulator said in a statement. "Taken together, these two incidents occurred in the last ten minutes of the drama resulting in a sustained and concentrated run of distressing and shocking scenes."
It criticised BBC One for not having provided an adequate warning about the graphically violent scenes before the show went to air, and said that a teaser which aired the following night at 8pm, directly after The Antiques Roadshow, was also inappropriately scheduled.
The BBC said during Ofcom's investigation that Casualty "depicts many of the gritter aspects of life in the medical world" and that the scenes were written, filmed and edited in consultation with "a senior BBC executive".
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