So, Casualty is back, and I swear Charlie Fairhead (Derek Thompson) has been there since the days of Florence Nightingale. And the BBC seem to think he’s equally emblematic of nursing in the nation’s consciousness, giving him a starring role in a video being made about healthcare at Holby General that gave him and other characters the chance to pontificate about the state of the nation with specific regard to the business of putting people back together again. It wasn’t altogether convincing, but it served a purpose.

This is the 23rd season of Casualty, and they’ve come back with a bang this time. The video device was cleverly used in this evening’s returning episode to provide potential new viewers with a perspective on the different tribes of the NHS: doctors, nurses, and paramedics. And the video crew were also caught up in the episode’s main story, featuring an excellently executed towerblock blaze.

This time round the show’s makers have gone for hardhitting, and for the most part it worked. A sense of Holby’s teenage underclass was developed, and the blaze storyline started with a white girl being heckled by black ones getting her own back by letting off a firework rocket inside their high rise building. One way to deal with bullying, I guess.

The girl in question turned out to come from a racist family, and left a swastika and a turd in the office of a black nurse she didn’t like. Looking for her, the nurse — Tess Bateman (Suzanne Packer) — ended up getting impaled on a piece of metal by the blazing flats. You couldn’t accuse the show of lacking stakes, in this case a big rusty one through Tess’s chest.

Inside the flats, things were just as intense. The video crew had accompanied a team of paramedics accompanied by a doctor, and while they were seeing to an elderly woman and her learning disabled grandson, the man in the flat below was in danger of immolation from the rapidly spreading fire.

The script and direction were pacy and urgent, and though it maybe moved a bit too fast at times it was good to see that the show’s makers have clearly thought about how they’d like Casualty to look and feel. Here’s hoping they can pull it off: this is clever and well-executed popular drama that I’ll be checking out again, if only tomorrow so I can see how this particular storyline resolves.