Casualty

On one of the busier nights of any term-time week, we were grateful to Jane, our visiting nurse, who was able to take Pads to see the making of Casualty, the latest event for his Brain Tumour Support Group. They really ought to think of a better name for it than that. Pads has suggested 'The Fat Martians' but that's not stuck for some reason... Production of Casualty has shifted to studios at Cardiff Bay. It is a huge facility and mimics a small hospital, including an array of ambulances. The prosthetics were fascinating, used to mimic all the gory bits that couldn't really be done on an actor. For example, there was a leg with a bone sticking out of it which could be manipulated off camera using a stick as the repair work was filmed. There was a mechanical new-born baby, with pipes that made its chest rise and fall. There were a whole range of babies in fact, "fat ones, thin ones, some as big as your head", to quote Pads. As they moved to the actual film set, Pads was given the director's chair to sit on. It was all so realistic, they even had a genuinely cold cup of coffee in the Ambulance bay. On the way out they passed through the extremely dark Pobl-y-Cwm-Ville. He was away from home for 3 hours in total, until 7:30pm. Perhaps this explains why he spent the whole of Wednesday rooted to his bed, listening to Dune and trying to crack Professor Layton challenges. Although it was tempting to get that for him for Christmas, the price of it has plummeted since then.