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Green Wing is a British sitcom set in the fictional East Hampton Hospital. It was created by the same team behind the sketch show Smack the Pony – Channel 4 commissioner Caroline…
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Investigate this subjectGreen Wing is a British sitcom set in the fictional East Hampton Hospital. It was created by the same team behind the sketch show Smack the Pony – Channel 4 commissioner Caroline Leddy and producer Victoria Pile – and stars Pippa Haywood, Mark Heap, Tamsin Greig, Stephen Mangan and Julian Rhind-Tutt.
Green Wing is a British sitcom set in the fictional East Hampton Hospital. It was created by the same team behind the sketch show Smack the Pony – Channel 4 commissioner Caroline Leddy and producer Victoria Pile – and stars Pippa Haywood, Mark Heap, Tamsin Greig, Stephen Mangan and Julian Rhind-Tutt. It focuses on soap opera-style twists and turns in the personal lives of the characters, portrayed in sketch-like scenes and sequences in which the film is slowed down or sped up, often emphasising the body language of the characters. The show had eight writers. Two series were made by the Talkback Thames production company for Channel 4.
The series ran between 3 September 2004 and 19 May 2006. One episode, filmed with the second series, was shown as a 90-minute-long special on 4 January 2007 in the UK, but was shown earlier in Australia and Belgium on 29 December 2006. Separate from the series, a sketch was made for Comic Relief and screened on 11 March 2005. Another was performed live at The Secret Policeman's Ball on 14 October 2006. On 29 April 2024, Green Wing returned as a six-part audio series released by Audible entitled Green Wing: Resuscitated, with a second series released on 25 June 2026.
Green Wing's plot revolves around the lives of the staff of the East Hampton Hospital Trust, a fictional National Health Service (NHS) hospital with staff ranging from the slightly unusual to the completely surreal.
The series begins with a new arrival, surgical registrar Caroline Todd (Tamsin Greig). Caroline works alongside two other doctors: Guy Secretan (Stephen Mangan), an arrogant, half-Swiss, womanising anaesthetist, and "Mac" Macartney (Julian Rhind-Tutt), a suave, fashionable surgeon. Caroline soon develops feelings for both of them, though she is unsure as to which of the two she truly loves. Throughout the series, it becomes clear that Mac is her true love, but a range of misadventures prevent their relationship from flourishing. Other people Caroline meets include Martin Dear (Karl Theobald), a friendly house officer who is constantly failing his exams. He is unloved by his mother and is often bullied by Guy. Martin soon develops feelings for Caroline. There is also Angela Hunter (Sarah Alexander), a seemingly perfect, but irritating, senior registrar in pediatrics. Caroline dislikes Angela, but ends up taking her in as a lodger.
Caroline's main rival for Mac's affections is Sue White (Michelle Gomez), the staff liaison officer employed to listen and respond to the problems of East Hampton's staff. Sue is hostile and contemptuous towards everyone except Mac, whom she loves to the point of madness.
Alan Statham (Mark Heap) is an overbearing, stuttering and pedantic consultant radiologist. He is in a relationship with Joanna Clore (Pippa Haywood), the 48-year-old head of human resources, although she despises him. Their relationship is an open secret, with student doctor Boyce (Oliver Chris) often hinting at it when goading Alan. Joanna's staff include Kim Alabaster (Sally Bretton); Naughty Rachel (Katie Lyons); Harriet Schulenburg (Olivia Colman), an overworked mother of four trapped in an unhappy marriage; and Karen Ball (Lucinda Raikes), who is often bullied by Kim and Rachel.
Green Wing was devised, created and produced by Victoria Pile. She was also the casting director, one of the writers, and part of the editing, filming and post-production teams. She described Green Wing as "a sketch-meets-comedy-drama-meets-soap", and a continuation of her previous show, Smack the Pony, where Green Wing's crew also worked. Unusually for a British sitcom, which typically has only one or two writers, the show had eight: Pile, her husband Robert Harley, Gary Howe, Stuart Kenworthy, Oriane Messina, Richard Preddy, Fay Rusling and James Henry.
Pile and her co-writers initially used battery packs to represent characters, moving them around on her desk to develop scenarios for the show. The decision to make the characters doctors came later. Pile recalls that she mentioned to Peter Fincham that a hospital setting would work well and that he subsequently reported that Channel 4 were enthusiastic about a hospital location, which settled the matter. Even later still, a plot was developed and wall charts were used to mark up story arcs.
The show was directed and edited (along with Pile) by Tristram Shapeero and Dominic Brigstocke. Sketches were sped up or slowed down to create comic effect, often using body language to create humour. Editing was also used due to the amount of corpsing that occurred during the filming of the show. Tamsin Greig was said to corpse frequently, and episodes were written to minimise the contact between the characters of Caroline Todd and Alan Statham because Tamsin Greig found it difficult not to laugh when acting alongside Mark Heap. The music, which features prominently in the show, was written by Jonathan Whitehead (under the name "Trellis") and won him an RTS Craft & Design Award.
Following her success with Smack the Pony, Channel 4 gave Pile a fairly free hand with her next project. Their only requirement was that it should have enough of a narrative thread to make it more of a sitcom than a sketch show.
The show had a half-hour pilot made in 2002 that was never aired. Scenes from the pilot were used in the first episode, "Caroline's First Day", and can be spotted due to the characters' appearance, most notably Rhind-Tutt's haircut. The pilot allowed the writers to experiment, such as using different filming techniques. In the pilot, Doon Mackichan played Joanna Clore and was meant to play her in the original series, but left when she became pregnant.
Before filming, Channel 4 funded a three-month development period in which the cast rehearsed material produced by the writing team and improvised around it, with the writers incorporating material developed during the sessions into subsequent scripts.
Although each script was fully written, the actors were allowed to improvis
Source: Green Wing (CC BY-SA)
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