Casualty Charles Venn’s wife struggled to watch Covid episode after family death

Casualty star Charles Venn revealed his wife found the show's coronavirus episode "tough" to watch after going through her own family loss.

The actor spoke to Lorraine Kelly on her ITV show about the BBC medical drama, which returned to screens earlier in January after a four-month break due to Covid-19.

In the episode, viewers saw the coronavirus pandemic through the eyes of hospital staff, with a heartbreaking moment seeing long-standing character Noel Garcia (Tony Marshall) dying from the disease.

Charles, 47, told Lorraine: "My wife, it was a bit more of a personal touch for her.

"Unfortunately, her first cousin died from this retched disease, so it was a tough, tough watch. It brought back some sad, painful memories."

Lorraine praised the medical drama for showing another view of the pandemic, informing viewers while also providing some much-needed entertainment.

Charles said: "It does tackle these real issues. Most of the scenarios, if not virtually all of them, have happened before, but of course you do dramatise it to give it the entertainment factor.

"That's the magic of Casualty – we do inform, but we do entertain as well."

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He added: "All we want to do is make sure everybody follows the guidelines.

"It's beyond reasonable doubt this virus kills, so we have to adhere to the rules at this point until this nightmare comes to an end."

The former Strictly star said: "Authenticity is everything and one of the wonderful responses we got from the first episode is it was very accurate to real life.

"From all the details, like the marks from the face masks, the fatigue, the stress, team members potentially passing from this thing."

Speaking of Noel's death, Charles added: "Noel – Tony Marshall – he's been part of the show for 12 years, so we were devastated."

Aside from dealing with the aftermath of Noel's death, the medical soap has plenty of other hard-hitting topics coming up.

In the first episode back, there was a difficult conversation between Charles' character Jacob and his on-off partner Connie, in which he confronted her with the fact that people of ethnic minority groups were being affected more by the virus.

Lorraine airs weekdays at 9am on ITV

• Lorraine Kelly
• Casualty

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