Children's Ward

Children's Ward
Also known as	The Ward (1995-1998)
Genre	Drama
Written by	Paul Abbott Tony Basgallop
Directed by	Steve Finn Alan Bell
Starring	Carl Rice Gilly Coman Will Mellor Anthony Lewis Ben Sowden
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Language(s)	English
No. of seasons	12
Production
Location(s)	Bolton, Greater Manchester, England, UK
Running time	30 minutes
Production company(s)	Granada Television
Broadcast
Original channel	ITV Network (CITV)
Picture format	4:3
Original run	15 March 1989 (1989-03-15) – 4 May 2000 (2000-05-04)

Children's Ward (retitled The Ward from 1995 to 1998) is a British children's television drama series produced by Granada Television and broadcast on the ITV network as part of its Children's ITV strand on weekday afternoons. The programme was set – as the title suggests – in Ward B1, the children's ward of the fictitious South Park Hospital (known as Sparky's), and told the stories of the young patients and the staff present there. Aimed at older children and teenagers, Children's Ward was a long-lived series for a children's drama, starting life in 1988 as a contribution to the Dramarama anthology strand, "Blackbird Singing In The Dead of Night", then first broadcast as a series 1989 and running from then until 2000.

The series was conceived by Granada staff writers Paul Abbott and Kay Mellor, both of whom have subsequently gone on to enjoy highly successful careers as award-winning writers of adult television drama. At the time, they were both working on the soap opera Coronation Street, and had recently collaborated on a script for Dramarama.

Abbott, who had been through a troubled childhood himself, had initially wanted to set the series in a children's care home rather than a hospital, but this was vetoed by Granada executives. During the course of its run, however, Children's Ward won many plaudits for covering difficult issues such as cancer, alcoholism, drug addiction and child abuse in a sensitive manner. The programme won many awards, including in 1996 a BAFTA Children's Award for Best Drama, won by an episode in which a serial killer lures children to him via the internet and is – highly unusually for children's television – not eventually caught.

As well as Abbott and Mellor, the series was worked on by many writers who have gone on to enjoy successful careers in adult television drama, perhaps most notably Russell T Davies, who was the show's producer, and writer of several episodes, from 1992 to 1995.

The decision to end Children's Ward came in mid-2000, after transmission of the final series, and ironically came as the sole original cast member Rita May – who played Auxiliary Nurse Mags – said she had no plans to leave the show.

The show hasn't been repeated since the final series finished broadcasting in 2000.

Filming location

• Filmed at Bolton General Hospital (now the Royal Bolton Hospital), in Bolton, Greater Manchester.

Characters

These are the original main characters from the first series. Some lasted several years and appeared in subsequent series too:

Character	Actor/Actress	Duration	Role
Dr. McKeown	Ian McCulloch	1989	Staff
Dr. Charlotte Woods	Carol Harvey	1989-
Dave Spencer	Andrew Hall	1989–
Diane Meadows	Janette Beverley	1989-
Mags	Rita May	1989-2000
Jack Crossley	Ken Parry	1989-
Jan Stevens	Nina Baden-Semper	1989-
Hospital Radio DJ (voice)	Ross King	1989-
Keely Johnson	Jenny Luckraft	1989-	Patients
Billy Ryan	Tim Vincent	1989-
Fiona Brett	Rebecca Sowden	1989-
Darren Walsh	William Ash	1989-

• Actors to go on to other theatre and television work include;Chris Bisson, Tina O'Brien, Vicky Binns, Ralf Little, Paul Swaine, Tim Vincent, Kieran O'Brien, Ben Sowden, Terence Hart, William Ash and Jane Danson.

Tie-in publications

Novelisations

• Children's Ward by Helen White, published by Network Books (an imprint of BBC Books) in 1990. £2.50 ISBN: 0-563-36170-0 (OUT OF PRINT)
• Children's Ward - Deadly Enemies by Helen White, published by Network Books (an imprint of BBC Books) in 1991. £2.99 ISBN: 0-563-36263-4 (OUT OF PRINT)
• Children's Ward - Make or Break by Helen White, published by Network Books (an imprint of BBC Books) in 1991. £2.99 ISBN: 0-563-36264-2 (OUT OF PRINT)
• Children's Ward - Lost and Found by Helen White, published by Network Books (an imprint of BBC Books) in 1992. £3.50 ISBN: 0-563-36391-6 (OUT OF PRINT)
• Children's Ward - On the Run by Helen White, published by Network Books (an imprint of BBC Books) in 1993. £3.99 ISBN: 0-563-36726-1 (OUT OF PRINT)
• Children's Ward - The Crash by Helen White, published by Puffin Books in 1994. £3.50 ISBN: 0-14-037350-0 (OUT OF PRINT)

Script book

• Exact title unknown, possibly Children's Ward. Edited by Lawrence Till (contains selected scripts from the series by Paul Abbott, Kay Mellor and John Chambers), published by Heinemann Plays/Oxford in 1992. Price and ISBN unavailable at time of writing. (OUT OF PRINT)

DVD Releases

Unlike many UK shows, Children's Ward has not been available in other English-speaking countries such as Australia or the U.S.A. prior to the U.K. As of May this year a U.K. DVD release has been announced for release in July 2011, for just the first series, from Network DVD. Series 2 is scheduled for release in October 2011 with Series 3 following in January 2012.

External links

• Children's Ward at the Internet Movie Database