Many famous faces and future stars passed through the doors of Oxbridge General during the drama’s impressive decade-long run. When theatre actress Sally Graham was admitted with a severe case of sunburn, the producers of the popular soap wanted a star name to play Ward Ten’s new celebrity patient. Cast for this special six-episode storyline was screen legend Annette Andre, who had already played dozens of roles on stage, television, radio and film, both in the UK and her native Australia. Having graced countless Q&A sessions with her memories of working on a host of iconic television dramas, the invitation to attend a Film is Fabulous! event as a special guest to talk about her long-lost appearances in Britain’s first twice-weekly serial was a very pleasant surprise for the star.

“When Rick Davey, the publisher of my memoir Where Have I Been All My Life?, told me that Film is Fabulous! wanted to talk to me about Emergency Ward 10, I thought, ‘Emergency Ward 10? But that was decades ago…’” Annette explains. “Because I was doing so much work through the Sixties and Seventies, flitting around from job to job, sometimes I’ve looked down my list of credits on IMDb and got to some and thought ‘What was that? I don’t remember that…’ But I remembered doing Emergency Ward 10 because there were a couple of funny incidents making it”

“I never saw any of my six episodes go out, because I was working a lot back then. Usually when I got home, I would be getting stuck into my lines and trying to get some sleep before I was off to the studio again. There were no recorders back then, so if you wanted to watch something on television, you had to stay in especially, which in my case would only be for something I really wanted to see. Otherwise, I would be out for dinner or going to a party.”

When Annette joined Emergency Ward 10, only Jill Browne, playing Nurse Carole Young, and Iris Russell, playing Matron Mary Stevenson, remained from the original regular cast, which had now sensibly expanded to meet the demands of the twice-weekly serial. “Regulars in a soap can be a little tricky to guest actors…” Annette explains, “especially if they’ve got used to working with people and then someone new comes in. But the cast on Emergency-Ward 10 were lovely. it was a nice team of people.”

“I was friends with Anne Lloyd [Nurse Jane Beattie] and one night we played poker with John Carlisle [Lester Large] and I won £20, a lot of money in those days, and John couldn’t believe it. He was a nice man. I also knew Tom Adams, because we had worked together on the film This is My Street with Ian Hendry. Tom was playing his ‘mister’ surgeon very stately, but I thought he seemed a bit grim just before one of the recordings. I remember saying to him, ‘Relax, Tom. Just relax.’ Waiting to go on is terrible. What I learned, and I think most of us did, was that the minute you stepped onto the stage, or the minute the camera was on you, it was deep breath time and you just had to do it, no matter what happened. If the door handle came off in someone’s hand, you had to go out the window, darling.”

Though as Annette recalls, the pre-performance butterflies were intensified during one of her Emergency Ward 10 appearances: “I don’t know whether it was the first episode or the second, but something had happened in the studio and they couldn’t pre-record it. Without about 30 minutes to go, we were told ‘The only way we can do this is to do it live, or we’ll have to cancel the episode…’ I’d done a lot of live television in Australia, but since I’d been working in England it had been ‘as live’ recordings, maybe with a bit of filming, so it was a long time since I’d done live. I said, ‘It’s all right. We’ll be fine…’”

“All us actors playing patients were lying on our hospital beds or, in my case, on a trolley. One of the actors said to me ‘God, I’m so nervous. I don’t know what to do.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Aren’t you nervous?’ I said, ‘No, not at all.’ But just minutes before we were due to go live, someone in the crew said, ‘What’s that noise?’ ‘What noise?’ I asked. ‘My God, it’s your trolley!’ It had hit me that we were about to go out live, and I’d suddenly realised ‘Oh no, I haven’t done this for a long time. One little mistake and whoops…’ I was lying on my front and because my heart was beating so fast, my trolley was making this shuddering noise! I said, ‘I don’t know if I can stop this…’ and of course, we all got the giggles! Some of the regulars weren’t too thrilled about doing it live either, but at least they didn’t have a noisy trolley to contend with.”