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A British hospital drama, set in Holby General Hospital, which has been going for over twenty years, debuting in 1986. Consists of weekly episodes, about 50-minutes to an hour long, aired at usually about 8-9/9-10pm on Saturdays. Consists of a mixture of medical drama and soap opera.
{{tropelist}}
* [[Accidental Murder]]: {{spoiler|Lara hits a policeman over the head with a brick because he tried to rape her}}.
{{quote|{{spoiler|[[I Didn't Mean to Kill Him|'''I WAS DEFENDING MYSELF!''']]}}}}
* [[Action Girl]]: Lara, who had worked in a war zone before arriving at Holby. Kudos to the writers for a getting a ''[[Tomb Raider]]'' joke in while the time was right.
* [[Adminisphere]]: Nathan is an [[Adminisphere]] unto himself, so much so that he makes all the other members of management look [[Benevolent Boss|wonderful]] by comparison.
* [[Aesop Amnesia]]: No one seems to realize that getting too emotionally involved with patients or even just your co-workers never ends well. Much exploited for the [[Rule of Drama]] but may be partially [[Justified Trope|justified]] since there is an element of [[Truth in Television]] and usually (but not always) happens to younger characters who haven't been around long enough to know better. [[Lampshaded]] by the episode "You Can't Take Them All Home With You". Although [[Broken Aesop|it doesn't help]] that characters such as Duffy or Maggie who get called out for being co-dependent on their work life and the emotional problems of others are portrayed as being better adjusted than most of their colleagues despite all of their [[Butt Monkey|personal mishaps]].
* [[All Lesbians Want Kids]]: Nearly subverted by a couple where one of them is eager to adopt a difficult young boy while the other isn't quite as keen but comes around to being a parent in the end.
** Slightly subverted in that Dixie does not fit this trope.
* [[Alpha Bitch]]: May Phelps, played by Laura Aikman, to a degree. Perhaps more than [[Madeline Zima]]'s character on ''[[Heroes]]''.
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* [[Captain Ersatz]]/[[Expy]]: Has ''inspired'' shows like ''[[Scrubs]]'' , ''[[Private Practice]]'' to create expies of their characters! Well, Kath, Staff Nurse Waters and Wayne anyway...
** That said, if Dylan Keogh in Series 25 had a cane, he'd be the bloated clone of a certain [[House (TV series)|ornery eccentric American doctor.]] (He even has the stubble down! The hell?)
* [[Cast Herd]]: Averted rather well for a show that takes place in pretty hierarchical setting.
* [[Chekhov's Gun]]: Played with. Each episode will feature several obvious ones, but some or all are liable to be red herrings.
* [[Childhood Marriage Promise]]: Duffy said that she would marry Charlie if he hadn't found the perfect woman by the time he was sixty.
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* [[Delivery Guy]]: Charlie helps Duffy deliver her third baby at home. Partially subverted by Charlie being a nurse and the implication that Duffy planned it so that she could avoid going to hospital.
* [[Did Not Do the Research]]: Although called Holby City and the town is called Holby, -by '''does not''' appear in any place-names around Bristol. -by is from Old Norse ''by'' village, and is only found [[Oop North|in Northern England and Scotland]], so by default it should really be Hol''ton''', with the last element being Old English ''tun'' village. Holby (or Holton as it should be) would mean either "village by the wood" from Old English ''holt'' "wood" or "village by the hollows", from Old English ''holh'' "hollow" and the endings mentioned above.
* [[Disaster Dominoes]]: Every second or third episode is based around this idea. In the first episode of 2012 for example, a dog escapes from a back garden, this leads to a major traffic accident taking out 5 or 6 cars, which leads to one man being delayed in stopping a suicide attempt, in trying to save the suicide victim and dealing with the traffic caused by an accident, a gas main is acidently destroyed causing an explosion which rips apart a housing estate. This in turn causes some nearby chemical drums to burst, creating a huge cloud of Hydrogen chloride, which ends up getting into the drain system causing part of the town to be evacuated. We end up seeing several hundred people affected by various burns and in the following episode it states there were at least 9 deaths. Oh, and all this happens on the same morning that the A&E department first reopens after a major fire so all the equipmenet is new and most of it untested. And this is just one episode.
* [[Dramatic Hour Long]]: About fifty minutes, but sometimes goes up to an hour and rarely any longer. One of the few exceptions to this was the Series 24 episode "A Day in a Life", which was ''nearly two hours long'', uninterrupted - although it was originally two seperate episodes that had to be cobbled into one owing to scheduling problems.
* [[Dropped a Bridget On Him]]: The episode "No Place Like Home", which featured Sarah Beck Maher as a hermaphrodite/transsexual character.
* [[Dr. Jerk]]: Patrick, but is balanced out by being slightly [[Troubled but Cute]] and the way he behaves towards Holly and, later, Lara.
* [[Dying Declaration of Love]]: {{spoiler|Dixie to Cyd in "Lie to Me". Plays the [[Now or Never Kiss]] straight. Subverts [[Anguished Declaration of Love]] because she does it so cheerfully that you know underneath she realises it looks like game over}}.
* [[Dysfunction Junction]]: In a big way, once you tally up the [[Backstory|backstories]]. If you didn't have a [[Dark and Troubled Past]] before you came here, you will when you leave. Brilliantly [[Lampshaded]] by a, sadly, removed [[
* [[Everybody Lives]]: At one particularly huge RTA, Anna sits down with the incident commander and the two of them realise that, apart from one driver who was DOA, everybody made it to the hospital. {{spoiler|This is then [[Subverted Trope|kicked to the kerb]] when Patrick goes into arrest before the credits roll}}.
* [[Expy]]: An expy of [[Miley Cyrus]] repeatedly appears as a [[Ghost Extras|background character]]. But she was [[Commuting on a Bus]] from ''[[Holby City]]''.
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* [[First Girl Wins|First Guy Wins]]: {{spoiler|Harry and Selena}}.
* [[Flashback Echo]]: {{spoiler|Lara has a very [[Nightmare Fuel|disturbing]] one during her trial while the police surgeon recounts her injuries to the jury}}.
* [[Foreshadowing]]: Incredibly heavy handed. But they also have a habit of foreshadowing events that don't happen, like you'll see two youths walking precariously along a very high wall, by the end of the episode no-one's fallen off a wall. So it's bit more of a random dartboard working out what the big medical emergency's going to be. But if someone gets into a car, it's definitely worth betting that they're going to crash.
** If they use a motor vehicle that isn't a car, the chances of a road accident are pretty much 1:1.
** One episode of Series 21 featured a shark just off the coast, with people in the water. This troper felt almost betrayed when no one became shark food.
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* [[Ms. Fanservice]]: Kath, the blonde nurse who appears in a few scenes. [http://a.imageshack.us/img688/9053/casualtyextraunknown1.jpg Here's a photo of her, for those wanting to see]
** Ramona Waters. No, don't confuse her with Ramona Flowers from ''[[Scott Pilgrim vs. the World]]'' (played by [[Mary Elizabeth Winstead]]).
* [[No Communities Were Harmed]]: though the production has gone through phases of trying to pass it off as a generic Everytown, there's no getting away from it: Holby is Bristol. It's even got the Clifton Suspension Bridge!
* [[Non-Fatal Explosions]]: [[Lampshaded]] and then averted in a mid-90's season finale; a man comes into the hospital with a bomb strapped to his back, and in a conversation with one of the nurses, mentions that a bomb in a cartoon would leave you "with a charred face and holes in your pants" whereas a real-life bomb is a bit more damaging. It turns out that this bomb is a ''lot'' more damaging, as the bomb's detonation at the end of the story almost totally destroys the (thankfully evacuated) hospital, giving the producers an excuse to redesign the sets for the following season.
* [[No Periods, Period]]: Subverted - no one gets periods, just post-partum haemorrhages that they think are periods.
* [[Patient of the Week]]: The only time the show averted this trope, it won a [[Oscar Bait|BAFTA]].
* [[Playing with a Trope]]: Done to ''[[Austin Powers]]'' proportions, but maybe not for parody/LampshadeHanging purposes though.
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** Also rotates between Wayne, Kojo, Alan the paramedic, [[One Steve Limit|Ramona/Staff Nurse Waters (who are one and the same)]] and an unnamed blonde nurse.
* [[Slap Slap Kiss]]: Lara and Patrick, but with towel-snapping. The rest of the time it's [[The Masochism Tango]] all the way.
* [[Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty]]: Gets a lot of flack from people in the NHS for glamorizing A&E and medicine in general, although it isn't actually that shiny, even going so far as to very occasionally sacrifice drama for a sideplot to show that there are still a lot of mundane tribulations involved in the job. It's pretty close to the gritty end with out being outright grey - uses a lot of blocks of watery greens, blues and formica-type colours and almost never any warm ones, although it is getting grittier in some places and shinier in others as time goes by.
* [[Sliding Scale of Silliness Versus Seriousness]]: Generally serious as a rule, usually taking a big but brief swing towards the other end every so often in the interests of contrast, which usually works well.
* [[Smoking Is Cool]]: Hell, Lara could make council tax look cool.
* [[Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome]]: Louis Fairhead.
* [[Someone to Remember Him By|Someone To Remember Her By]]: Angel.
* [[Soundtrack Dissonance]]: ''Have a Nice Day'' by the Stereophonics plays at the start of episode where Lara goes back to work {{spoiler|after being released from prison}}.
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* [[Western Terrorists]]: An episode which would have centred around a Muslim suicide bomber was rewritten with [[Animal Wrongs Group|animal rights extremists]] as the perpetrators.
* [[Where the Hell Is Springfield?]]: Ever noticed how Holby looks a lot like Bristol?
** Holby is supposedly a town actually on the fringes of the City of Bristol.
** Well, it would appear to be an [[Expy]] of Bristol, or at least, the South Midlands. Road signs for destinations there are prominent in some scenes, and the road sign notices would indicate it.
** The BBC will be moving production to Cardiff in 2011.
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* [[Writers Cannot Do Math]]: When Duffy mentions that her kids are settled in boarding school in Singapore, Paul, her youngest, is between five and six - even if the school billeted him with a host family, it's still highly unusual for a child as young as that to go to boarding school full time (most take them from nine and up). Also, Peter would be 18, which would mean he'd probably would have finished school and could have stayed at home if he wanted.
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This show does ''not'' provide an example of:
* [[British Brevity]]: The shortest ever season of ''Casualty'' was Season 3, with only 10 episodes (the first two had 15 each). Since then, the episode count per season has been rising more often than not, and now tops out at Season 24 containing 49 weekly episodes. Some want it to go all-year 'round, but this hasn't happened... yet.
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[[Category:British Series]]
[[Category:The Eighties]]
[[Category:Casualty]]▼
[[Category:Needs a Better Description]]
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