An ensemble medical drama charting the professional and personal lives of staff in a busy city hospital’s accident and emergency ward.
Set in the A&E department of St Victor’s Hospital in Manchester, the serial initially centres on the fractious professional relationship between consultant surgeon Robert Kingsford (Martin Shaw) and head registrar Christine Fletcher (Niamh Cusack). As they contend with a relentless stream of emergencies, their work rivalry evolves into a complex personal attachment, supported by a team that includes Mike Gregson (David Harewood) and Louise Macken (Esther Hall). From its third season, the programme was retitled A&E, and the arrival of acerbic trauma surgeon Jack Turner (Michael Kitchen) and nurse Sam Docherty (Jane Danson) introduced new sources of conflict.
The defining characteristic of Always and Everyone was its structural discipline. It consistently rejected the genre convention of showing the calamitous events that brought patients to the hospital. Instead, the narrative began abruptly at the moment of arrival, focusing the drama entirely on the clinical process and the professional pressures within the ward. This procedural approach gave the series a grounded, almost documentary-like feel, separating it from more sensationalist contemporaries. The decision to shorten the title to the blunt and functional A&E for its third season reinforced this commitment to the workplace over the spectacle. See seperate entry for A&E.
Broadcast: ITV – Granada, 32 Episodes, 7 June 1999 – 22 August 2002
Created by: Stephen Butchard
Executive Producers: Simon Lewis, Susan Hogg
Producer: Francis Hopkinson
Theme Music: Julian Brookhouse
Main Cast: Martin Shaw (Robert Kingsford), Niamh Cusack (Christine Fletcher), David Harewood (Mike Gregson), Esther Hall (Louise Macken), Paul Warriner (Stuart Phelan), David Partridge (David Scobie), Michael Kitchen (Jack Turner), Jane Danson (Sam Docherty), Jaye Griffiths (Ruth Cole), James Murray (Danny Barton), Emily Hamilton (Saskia Walker), Parminder Nagra (Sunita Verma)
