'There were people dying around us, it was awful'

As cult comedy 'Green Wing' turns 20, Jacob Stolworthy sits down with its creator and cast to talk corpsing at the hospital

- Jacob Stolworthy

Twenty years ago, Channel 4 rolled the dice and the result was Green Wing. After success with Smack the Pony, Victoria Pile created a sitcom based in a fictional hospital staffed by a bunch of weird and wonderful characters, who would spend much of the episodes doing anything but work: Green Wing is the only show set in the medical world featuring crossbows, camels and naked recorder playing. There’s also incest.

When Green Wing premiered on 3 September 2004, it was a hard sell – surreal, offbeat and un-PC – accentuated by the now-signature use of speed-up and slo-mo shots. Pile had even convinced Channel 4 to extend the running time of each episode to 45 minutes.

To mark the show’s 20th anniversary, The Independent spoke to Pile and a number of the show’s cast members about their core memories, the wild antics their characters got up to, and their fears of corpsing and getting mistaken for real hospital staffers while filming their scenes.

In 2002, Victoria Pile, enjoying success with sketch show ‘Smack the Pony’, is asked by Channel 4 to devise a new series.

Michelle Gomez [Sue White]: Victoria Pile has one of the most original imaginations. She plucked this whole thing out of her head. I think it was called Green Wing because a green fly landed on a script in her office.

Mark Heap [Dr Alan Statham]: I knew the wonderful Vic Pile who said there was some silly thing about hospitals she was doing. She said, “You probably can’t be bothered but would you come in?”

With an idea in motion, Pile sets her sights on casting and invites a ragtag bunch of actors for in-character hot-seat interviews. Slowly, the cast of ‘Green Wing’ is assembled.