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t type of television drama so to make comparisons between to the two. To do this I chose to look at Casualty (fig.3), a hospital drama which is broadcast on BBC1. Casualty is the longest running medical drama (first broadcast in 1986) and it follows the lives of the staff and patients in the Accident and Emergency department at the fictional ‘Holby City' Hospital which is located in Bristol. The programme not only concentrates on the goings on within the hospital, but also explores the private lives of the staff. It also does not only focus on the one profession of people in the hospital (i.e. the doctors), but centres around surgeons, nurses, receptionists etc (fig.4). This makes the drama seem a lot more realistic because obviously all the staff in a hospital are of equal importance. The makers show this by not having just a few main characters; instead they have many characters that get roughly the same amount of screen time and storylines each. Each episode will start off with the back story of the person, or the family of the person, who is going to be the main patient within that episode. We will see the events leading up to their incident and see how it happens. Obviously the majority of the programme is set in the hospital but we also follow to ambulance drivers when they go on call outs. This makes Casualty fit in with certain aspects of Social Realism which is often filmed on location. There are ways in which Casualty is both realistic and not. It shows good realism from a medical perspective, they manage this because they have real medical staff on set at all time to make sure that everything is represented accuracy. They also have to make sure that they always use the correct terminology and get all of the medical concepts exactly right as to make sure medically it is 100% accurate. However, similarly to Desperate Housewives, the lack of realism is down to the frequency at which events are occurring. Every week in Holby City hospital there are many more disastrous accidents and much more disease than any real life hospital would see, but again the incidents obviously all need to be exaggerated greatly to keep the audience interested in the programme. I can make a similar observation of Casualty that I did of Desperate Housewives. This is that Ellis was write in his theory that ‘there is no realism' is correct, not only over television drama itself (that is to say that all programmes represent different aspects of reality) but in each drama individually. This becomes more and more obvious when analysing television dramas because, as I said before, there are so many elements to a drama that some could be realistic and some could not be. Therefore, event within one drama series there are what can only be described as realisms.

Both of these television dramas that I have been studying have a lot of similar conventions to those of social realism. To begin with they both deal with the contemporary issues that I mentioned before (e.g. homosexuality) in a very open way and do not try to hide this type of issues away, because that is not what we should and do act like in society. They are also contemporary in the sense that, unlike watching a film, we never know what is going to happen in the end because there is no end, and the programme makers may not even know so it is impossible for anyone else to. In addition to this, they fit the convention of being secular; an extension of real life, because they use real life s